New Story: MLA Perihelion (and some writing talk) · 10:27am Apr 26th, 2016
For those who remember My Little Apprentice, the third story in the trilogy is finished and will be released this coming Saturday! As the title of this blog post implies, the story will be called "MLA: Perihelion." It will be posted in a bi-weekly update schedule (Sat and Wed) until it is complete. The story's first draft is finished, but editing and revision of the later chapters is ongoing.
For those who might be a little confused (since I've made some changes with MLA), let me briefly explain. My Little Apprentice was split into a trilogy, with the first story ending at the encounter with Discord. An entirely new story, Apogee, was written to follow it. This story, Perihelion, will complete the trilogy and bridge My Little Apprentice with "Harmony Defended."
This means the chronological order of the stories in this series is:
1. My Little Apprentice
2. MLA: Apogee
3. MLA: Perihelion
4. Harmony Defended
5. ???
6. Pax Humana
Those who have not had the chance to read past the first story should check out Apogee if you'd like to be ready for this new story as it releases.
A revision of Harmony Defended is my next project for this series, but I'll probably write something else first, so I'll keep the interested posted with these blogs.
I haven't done this before, but considering Perihelion was written under such unusual circumstances, I thought I'd talk a little bit about what happened and my experiences. Everything beyond this point will be about the behind-the-scenes production for the story. There should not be any major spoilers, but those not interested in the writing process probably won't enjoy reading on.
So, in the text above I mentioned that Perihelion's first draft was written. I first announced that I was working on it 17 days ago, before I had actually started. The first draft actually took from the 10th (when it started) to the 25th (when I wrote the last words on it). That's 16 total days of writing time... though that time ended up overlapping with my university finals and then my move back to California for the summer, introducing far more delay than I am happy with. The story will be a little shorter than the other two in the series, coming in at about 80k unedited (somewhere between 75-85 edited).
Perihelion represents my first test of a new writing method. Assuming the experiment's quality proves in line with its quantity, it should enable me to write far more of the stories I've been imagining but never thought I would have the time to finish. So how did the experiment work?
The majority of the words (47k) were written in three days:
The method is one I learned from an author I heard speak at a recent local writer's convention (I'm so sorry I forgot your name, because your technique is so awesome!) It promised to 'write a novel in 3 days'. This involved writing for about 12 hours on each of the days, with a daily goal of about 15k. During this period, I isolated myself from almost everything. Hardly talked to anyone or did anything else, besides maybe two hours each day for exercise, socializing, cooking/whatever. It also involved heavily planning the story, so that each chapter and scene was clearly outlined. I think I probably spent 6 hours in planning beforehand, and as a result I never spent a moment thinking about where to go next, because I already knew.
That didn't mean new scenes didn't grow up along the way, and a few didn't change. Some characters developed in ways I didn't expect, and a few things got cut. That's the nature of a living story, and I take these changes as evidence that I was feeling the usual inspiration I would while writing.
I don't think this experiment would be possible for those who don't outline. I've written stories both ways (Apogee, Harmony Defended, and Futile Resistance were outlined while LPoE's series was "discovery written" without chapter plans), and I can say without a doubt that it would not have been possible to accomplish my goal without the detailed plans. Why?
Well, I guess that comes back to how it feels. In my experience, the early hours of writing were the worst. The "holy crap I have so much to write today" as well as getting into the world and the minds of the characters. After about 2k, I'd find myself in my ideal writing state, where I'm super inspired and loving the characters and excited to see where things go next. I took about a 30-minute break between scenes (which for me are about 1-5k long), just long enough that my brain could rest without getting completely out of the mood.
I think my writing got better and better until about 10k, when I started losing steam. Writing got slower until I hit 13 or so, when it became a dreadful uphill slog to make it to those last 2k. It was especially at times like these when I found myself thankful for the plan since I can imagine hitting a scene transition (as always happened at least once) probably would've ended my writing too soon. Having that extremely helpful outline to look at kept me from getting discouraged and kept me going.
Things didn't change much between days, though I'd say the writing was easiest on day 2 and hardest at the end of day 3. I'm not sure I could've done it for another day straight, not with how drained I started to feel. The effort was creatively exhausting. While I never wrote crap or forced words out, I think I probably would've had to if I'd tried to keep it going another whole day.
If you notice a significant change in quality past the 50k word mark or so, that's probably evidence that my experiment wasn't as successful as I would've hoped. So far the rapid first draft has needed a little more attention than usual during editing, but not much more.
I completed my goal of 45k for the 3 days and took that image on midnight of that Tuesday, then rested from writing for a full day. It felt like my creative "muscles "recovered quite quickly, after that, and by the second day writing felt almost the same as it had before the experiment. Things changed for the better at that point, in a way I think that might make the experiment worth it for other writers.
Know that feeling right after you step off a treadmill, when walking feels really easy? The experiment was sorta like that, and I found my word count average doubled (~4k instead of ~2k) over the next week or so without any noticeable increase in the amount of time or effort I spent writing. 30k would probably have taken me more than the remaining 12 days given those days also including moving and finals, to say nothing of the editing on the early chapters. I've noticed some percentage of that speedup has remained with me, and I'm still writing about ~3k a day without more effort than I'm used to. Pretty awesome!
The experiment is still ongoing. Editing isn't done on that first 47k, so it's possible that a significantly larger load for revisions was created and in the end I won't have saved time. It's possible things will suck and I'll have to rewrite whole sections. Still, if the way I felt while writing suggests anything, it's that things went great. I feel the plotting and pacing of the stories I've planned are far better than those I didn't, even if the others may have other advantages.
With any luck, the result of this whole adventure will be a story I probably never would've had time to write otherwise, delivered to you with no reduction in quality and an only modestly greater workload for the editing team. Those who wish to see the results of this experiment can compare the quality of the first 50k words to the latter 30k and see if there's a difference. If I did my job right, there won't be.
Of course, this technique was difficult. Finding 3 days I could completely sacrifice to writing wasn't easy, and the stress during those days was quite high (towards the end anyway). Even so, I consider this experience quite rewarding, and plan on repeating it for another novel I'd like to write this Summer (unconnected to MLA or LPoE). If repeatable, it would prove to be the solution to how to keep writing fanfiction even though my personal free time is decreasing more and more as I approach graduation.
If you're a writer and this sort of experiment sounds interesting to you, please try it! Just set your goal according to your regular wordcount. I normally write about 1.5k an hour when not rushing, so I extracted 10 hours of writing per day and ended up at 15k a day and 45k total. Those with higher productivity than me might want to aim for more ambitious goals, while those who write more slowly might want to reduce your goals.
I think many who wouldn't imagine themselves capable of something like this will be pleasantly surprised by their results. There's something to be said for focusing your brain on something almost constantly for so long-- I think you'll find it can do some amazing things. It's a feeling like nothing else-- I started dreaming in words towards the third day, and thinking of nothing but the story for a little while there. Never had anything like that happen before.
Just schedule it well, pick some reasonable goals, and plan in detail. Oh, and let me know if you try it. I'd love to hear how it went!
-Starscribe
I still have yet to read your "My Little Apprentice" series, guess I know what I'm doing today.
BTW, Imgur doesn't like us hosting images on their site, so you might want to consider something else. Dropbox might be a good alternative
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Well if you do read it, stop at Apogee! Harmony Defended will spoil some stuff from the story coming out, and other things will be wrong (since I haven't revised it yet)
It seems you're right, judging on the broken links. I'm loathe to keep them on dropbox, but... I'd rather that than photobucket or Imageshack. I'll see about getting that switched over.
I want to try this, but unfortunately I'm on a network admin course with 8 hours of firehouse style information a day... maybe during summer leave...
Awesome! Can't wait to start reading it, and I'll try not to get behind on it like I did with the LPoE stories.