Sketch it out! Sketch it out now.

A common question I get is when do I find the time to write. Like a lot of other new authors, I’m juggling this with a full-time job and a young family. But I love writing, and these stories are in my head anyway, so when I sit down to put them on paper, I try to do it in a smart way. I don’t start with a blank slate (or a blank screen, since it’s the 21st century).

This isn’t my clever idea. I got it from Rachel Aaron’s blog post on how she went from 2k to 10k words a day. That blog post changed how I write in a lot of ways – her Triangle of Writing Metrics was such a lightbulb moment for me. Now I only write what I’m enthusiastic about. If I think something else needs to be fit in, I write INSERT MORE HERE and skip ahead. On revision, I end up deleting a bunch of those notes without ever adding anything.

But my favourite takeaway from her blog post was the pre-writing sketch. She talks about it as a paragraph, but this is what I do – it’s often replete with arrows and bubbles and as  I start to document the chapter or scene that is in my head, questions arise. In this case, for chapter 10, I realized that I don’t have the members of town council sorted out yet. That would pull me up cold tonight when I sit down to write up the scene that’s been playing out in my head – because up here, the mayor is just called the mayor. But Wardham’s small, maybe it should only have a reeve…And so now I’ve tagged this as something that I need to research before I waste any time staring at a blank screen.

The title for this blog post, Sketch it out! Sketch it out now, comes from a conversation I had with my critique partner the other day. It was, like a lot of our instant message chats, about being stuck. My default question: have you sketched it out yet?

All good things come from paper and pen, even in the digital age.

Instead of taking a picture of my most recent example and just emailing it to her, I decided to share it on the blog.

So I’m a fan, and have yet to experience a downside of a quick pre-writing sketch myself. Any writers find that this technique leads you astray?

If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it, and Aaron’s other techniques to increase your writing productivity. When I was writing my first book, I was happy to get five or six hundred words an hour, and a thousand words a day. Now that’s my absolute bare minimum on a writing day, and I’m secretly unhappy if I don’t hit 3k on a weekday and 5k on a Saturday or Sunday.

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