Retreat, Day 3

Today’s wordcount:5008
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 95071
Total word count for the week: 5008
Total word count for this retreat: 22085
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, story “District of Brass”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 30 minutes
10263 steps, 67 flights of stairs

From today, the beginning of a Serendib story, “District of Brass”

In Serendib, there is the District of Brass, and there the traveler can find marvelous machines, made not just of that metal, but many of the lesser metals, like iron and aluminum and the first degree of steel. The tinkerers of the District of Brass can make any machine, but always after their fashion, which is cogs and gears and wheels within wheels, not the crystals and lights of other lands.

Once there was a tinkerer there, who had not come from elsewhere, but was native to the city, which meant that anything could happen with her. Her name was Pye and she was a clever girl, who loved to puzzle things out, and by the time she was six, she had created mechanisms that performed not only all her own chores, but those of her slower siblings. She was an innovator, and many disliked her intensely for her habit of looking at a design and saying, in the most reasonable of tones, “Yes, that’s clever enough, but what if you did it this way?” before pointing out any number of improvements.

This dislike was exacerbated by her main failing, which was that she was incapable of puzzling out people as expertly as she did machines ““ in fact, people were mysteries to her, always saying one thing and then acting another way. There were rules to existence, and they seemed to change so often, or at least be conditional and dependent to the point where there was no telling what to do at any given moment without standing and thinking for a good ten minutes about it.

While her family was fond enough of her, though most preferred not to spend too much time in her company, since the designs she was improving were so often their own, Pye had no friends, only acquaintances among her age-mates and other school friends, and the nurse who had raised her between the ages of eight and fourteen, and now lived in an elderquarter of a more advanced age, where the medical care was far better.

Pye would have liked to have said that she didn’t care about her lack of friends, but the truth is that she cared in two ways: one, she would have liked to have had friends, and two, she thought it an abnormality in herself not to have accumulated such things already.

Here is the only thing I know to be true about writing advice: none of it is 100% true. There are always exceptions, always idiosyncrasies of individual process.

Here is the smartest piece of writing advice I ever got: said by Syne Mitchell while I was at Clarion West in 2005, “Try different things, find what works for you, and do that. Lots.”

Writers should pay attention to our own process. Sometimes we’re reluctant to do so. We worry that like the centipede in the story who stops being able to walk after thinking about exactly how she does it, looking at our own process will damage or kill it. A Schrödinger’s cat: we know we’re doing something, but if we look to prove that, it’ll vanish.

This is not actually true. Looking will, most probably, not kill it. If you are the rare exception that cannot look at their process without damaging it, a brief examination will let you know this without damaging anything too much. Maybe. There are no guarantees in writing advice.

But if you are part of the vast majority that WILL learn from it, what will you gain?

• A knowledge of WHEN you’re productive that will help you make the most of that time. Is the morning your most productive time? Then schedule your writing for those hours rather than the draggy and low word count afternoon.
• A knowledge of WHAT conditions make you productive. Does the coffee shop’s bustle and a few doses of caffeine stimulate you into productivity? Or do you need solitude and the ability to read aloud as you go? Find it out and do it, do it, do it.
• Permission to indulge yourself. Do new notebooks spur you to new stories? Then go for it. Does a two hour walk shake loose the clarifications you need for that revision? Then put on your sneakers.
• A sense of yourself as an artist. Because you are, you know. Your mind is a precious machine capable of creating wonderful things. Coddle and care for it. Appreciate the amazing combinations it makes, the verbal webs it spins, the hard glitter of its jewels.

Take a few weeks. Track your daily word count as well as the circumstances that accompany it, such as when and where you wrote. But go further than that. Track the other things that affect it: your mood, your diet, your sleep. You may find that daily walk doubles your output, that the days when you took time to eat breakfast rather than just slug down a latte, change your outlook.

FOr many of us, stress is a killer of productivity. I know nothing can drive me faster to the distraction of Bejeweled Blitz or cruising my Twitter stream. All the more reason to de-stress your life whenever you can, all in the name of writing.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.