Nearing the four-year mark of leaving my corporate life behind to become a writer, I’m proud of how much I’ve grown. I started this journey trying to figure out how I wanted to write. While I did have questions about what my style of writing would be, I was becoming increasingly concerned with my process. Though I could write a short story in a few sittings, I quickly learned that writing a novel demanded far more consistency over a much longer course of time. After a couple of months of inconsistent output, my mentor at the time suggested I methodically find how many words I could consistently produce a day.
Starting at 200 words a day, I gradually increased my quota by a hundred every week. I was to mark the last daily quota I was able to fulfill every day of the week.
Turned out that number was 500.1
With that number to work with, I eventually completed a full draft of my manuscript. It was supposed to be a novel, but it became a novella after I crashed into multiple dead-end plot points between four incomplete drafts. I stitched together the good pieces of those four drafts and tried to make a cohesive story out of them. I was more concerned with it being “finished” than I was with what my story was becoming, which was a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate chapters. It was apparent to my patient beta readers that the sum of its parts was just a series of poorly connected vignettes.
The problem I kept running into while trying to write this story was that I didn’t have a process for writing besides sitting in front of the computer and making myself write. Forcing myself to write was an important skill to build, but I needed more to avoid the dead-ends of my previous drafts. So I picked up a bunch of books on writing to find out how other folks did it.2 After copious amounts of notes and many hours of reading, I didn’t find anything that I could adopt as my own writing process. I watched videos of other authors talking about their writing process, and authors trying out other authors’ writing processes. There was still nothing that suited me.
Only recently did I realize that while I was focusing on what wasn’t working or what was falling short of my (high) expectations, I was creating a process that was uniquely my own. I had to figure out what worked for me through trial and error, pragmatically keeping what served me and discarding what didn’t. There also had to be an acception3 of the accommodations I needed to write consistently. I finally pursued a diagnosis of adult ADHD and got medication for it.4 What I saw as distractions became mindful diversions to recharge.5 My process is still far from perfect, but I can say that I’m enjoying it much more now.
I want to share with you my growth and development as a writer beyond the finished product. My new upcoming series, processing…, will share my reflections and refinement of the writing process, along with updates on current projects. I hope that in sharing my progression I can show that each diversion, divergence, and digression can still be a step forward in the right direction.
You can expect processing… on the 15th of every month starting August 15th. In the meantime, trust your process.
Read more from Queen’s Muse!
There was a brief intermission where I attempted NaNoWriMo. I was able to keep the pace of 1667 words a day for only two days before petering out to zero by the second week.
How We Do It is a good collection of insights from Black writers published recently.
This was the word that came to me as I was writing this sentence. I looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making up a word (again), and it is definitely a whole word! Red squigglies be damned, I will use what I like (“squiggly” should be a noun too, by the way)!
ADHD is as much structural as it is neurological. Within capitalistic expectations of production, there aren’t always optimal choices for a profession that doesn’t extract too much and keep a roof over your head.
I had to build a trust that I would get back to work in a timely manner. It’s kind of like the Pomodoro technique, but I time things by vibes only.