2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love

Now that I've decided this is the novel I want to write, the first thing I do is put down everything I already know about the book. These are usually the ideas that exploded into my mind and made me want to write the story in the first place. Sometimes it's a character or situation, sometimes it's a magical system or a setting. Whatever it is, I wr

"Be excited about everything you write"

One of the earliest lessons I learned about writing was that if I was stuck, it was because I didn't know something.

That’s what Step 0 is about. You don't need to have a plot or characters or even an ending at this point, but you do need a certainty that the idea floating in your head is something that will not only hold your interest not only through the time it takes to write, edit, and polish a manuscript, but will, once finished, do whatever it is you want t

just asking “What else can I do here?” every time you look at a scene will keep your mind open to myriad, often wonderful, possibilities.

I started keeping records. Every day I sat down to write, I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet

the first question you should be asking yourself isn’t “Is this a good book?” but "Is this really the story I want to spend my time on?"

The days when I broke 10k were the days when I was writing scenes I'd been dying to write since I planned the book.

Now, instead of treating bad writing days as random, unavoidable disasters to be weathered, like thunderstorms, I started treating them as red flags.

Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write that day.