Oooo, Alix Harrow! I love her. Waiting my turn with her latest on my library app right now.
There's another timeframe, which is how long do you allow yourself to research before you start writing. For me so far, that's three months. I'm giving myself until the end of the year and then I have to start actually writing.
Oooh interesting. As an academic, and also in my nonfiction writing, I see writing and research as separate (though related) tasks that are better done in parallel than in serial. One thing I make my masters' students do is write from the very beginning of their thesis process. Ideally 30 minutes per day where they turn off the Internet, aren't allowed to check sources (they have to put Ref TK to come back and fix/fact check later, in the separate painful task of Editing).
The usual temptation I see (and feel myself) is to do tons and tons of research (reading other people's papers, because that is a clear finite task that's easy to tick off). If you do that, you may have read 200,000 words, and written zero-- giving you a backlog of Other People's Ideas you feel you have to explain/include/cite, without necessarily clarifying your own argument or story. In the end, even though all that you read may have shaped your thinking in some way, only the material that the reader needs to know to understand why you did what you did is what gets explained and cited.
Curious how any of this resonates for the kind of writing you do, if at all! :)
I do think there comes a time when researching is no longer constructive and just becomes an avoidance behavior. I am certainly prone to that. But I also think there's this beautiful, wandering curiosity headspace that exists for me before any good writing, and whether I'm feeding that curiosity by researching or by walking in the woods and letting my mind wander I have to give it space to light a fire in me. Knowing when to take that somewhat numinous curiosity and start to actually make it into something manifest in such a way as to not kill it is a constant question for me.
Five weeks to finish the first draft on this book, but I was already 20k in. And I'm on week three of editing. I'm pushing for the first substantive edit to be done today! Super excited!!!
My brain hurts, but I finished it! Thanks Kimberly. The manuscript is in the mail to one of my readers, and in the meantime, I'm working on a screenplay based on a short story of mine. Indigenous horror.
Thanks, I needed this today.
Oooo, Alix Harrow! I love her. Waiting my turn with her latest on my library app right now.
There's another timeframe, which is how long do you allow yourself to research before you start writing. For me so far, that's three months. I'm giving myself until the end of the year and then I have to start actually writing.
Oooh interesting. As an academic, and also in my nonfiction writing, I see writing and research as separate (though related) tasks that are better done in parallel than in serial. One thing I make my masters' students do is write from the very beginning of their thesis process. Ideally 30 minutes per day where they turn off the Internet, aren't allowed to check sources (they have to put Ref TK to come back and fix/fact check later, in the separate painful task of Editing).
The usual temptation I see (and feel myself) is to do tons and tons of research (reading other people's papers, because that is a clear finite task that's easy to tick off). If you do that, you may have read 200,000 words, and written zero-- giving you a backlog of Other People's Ideas you feel you have to explain/include/cite, without necessarily clarifying your own argument or story. In the end, even though all that you read may have shaped your thinking in some way, only the material that the reader needs to know to understand why you did what you did is what gets explained and cited.
Curious how any of this resonates for the kind of writing you do, if at all! :)
Good luck with your project!
I do think there comes a time when researching is no longer constructive and just becomes an avoidance behavior. I am certainly prone to that. But I also think there's this beautiful, wandering curiosity headspace that exists for me before any good writing, and whether I'm feeding that curiosity by researching or by walking in the woods and letting my mind wander I have to give it space to light a fire in me. Knowing when to take that somewhat numinous curiosity and start to actually make it into something manifest in such a way as to not kill it is a constant question for me.
Five weeks to finish the first draft on this book, but I was already 20k in. And I'm on week three of editing. I'm pushing for the first substantive edit to be done today! Super excited!!!
Wow, that's amazing progress, nice work Martin!
My brain hurts, but I finished it! Thanks Kimberly. The manuscript is in the mail to one of my readers, and in the meantime, I'm working on a screenplay based on a short story of mine. Indigenous horror.