Chaney Writes

March 31st was the official end of quarter one of 2019. A fourth of the year is over. We’ve long since ditched those New Year’s resolutions and are floating in the day to day of another year. Did you hit your Q1 goals? Did you have Q1 goals? What is Q1? Quarters are usually talked about in financial reporting and boring day job meetings. However, quarters are a great way to make sure we are staying on track with our....

One piece of advice going around Twitter is “don’t compare your draft to someone’s final product,” which helps emphasize the idea that a project should go through a development process. This got me thinking about how writing compares to the process of shooting movie. How the various stages of the production sync up with...

Often while editing there is a scene or character that doesn’t feel right even after several passes. By doing research online about various methods of drafting and how to read your own work I was able to construct a method to proceed through the process. However, after listening to Joe Abercrombie’s interview on ‘The Bestseller Experiment’ episode nine I began to develop another test to use while editing. Joe received harsh, but fair criticism when he was starting out from his Mother who, per Joe, said:

Yesterday was a good day of writing. The coffee next to my laptop tasted better than usual. The words flowed onto the page without a fight and rereading it was a pleasure, not a ......

In all my previous failed attempts at crafting a novel, my writing style was that of a pantser (one who writes by the seat of their pants) in the truest sense of the word. I didn’t plan any part of the book. From the moment the idea hit I let the words fly. Characters? They’ll come. Setting? Whatever works. Story? It’s on the blank page all I have to do is find it! Where this haphazard methodology led was stalling out when ideas ran dry and leaving the work behind. That is until I learned to use the concept of a roadmap to help give direction to my pantser style.

A current piece of advice floating around Twitter is that one way to approach writing a book is to take the total word count and divide it by the days in a year. Alright, let's assume 100,000 words is our goal. This is considered a “generally safe” range for mainstream fiction. Taking 100,000 words and dividing it by 365 you get 274. If you take off a couple of days a year for birthdays or holidays then you're looking at somewhere around 280 words a day.

Why. One of the five Ws we learn about in grade school and the motivation behind any goal. Why defines the reasons we stay up late writing and sacrifice weekends revising. Why can be the motivator during desperate periods of self-doubt. A powerful why can ignite the beginning, traverse the middle, and take you through to the end.