Consistency is Key
Greetings from the well-shielded bubble of Santa Barbara County, where cost of living is over $110,000 a year and the average rent is somewhere between $2,500 and $4,500 a month. How can anyone live here?
Seriously. If you do know, tell me.
A feeling of long forgotten dread, envelopes me. I have begun cataloging dates, places, names, and—to a lesser degree, although still necessary—planetary physics for my upcoming book. Everything is coming along as it should. I just need to learn how to navigate my custom, offline, Wikipedia-esque brain dump with greater efficiency. Most of my work has been conducted historically at my local coffee shop, yet I find myself bereft of the screen real estate needed to see all of my notes while writing. If anyone is familiar with a good solution to this problem, let me know.
As the blog title says, “Consistency” is everything when keeping up on a project. Due to all the travel of the past month or so, I’ve been struggling to keep the momentum going with the new book. I think the biggest hurtle is the fact that I’m still spinning up the work conceptually, as I write it. This takes time. After writing Dynamic Synapse Protocol and Turing’s Miscellany, the importance of having easily searchable resources is paramount. At several points in writing DSP, I was going back and fourth between chapters, checking dates and character backstories, trying to make sure everything all matched up. (After re-reading DSP in the run up to writing TM, I found only one major continuity error in DSP that I would like to eventually fix. For the time being, you tell me what I messed up and you get a cookie!) This time, I will be working with several documents, including a comprehensive timeline, which should hopefully speed up a lot of things.
“Consistency” functions more like “momentum” in my vocabulary. Things that are conducive to momentum is building a single world and then hunkering down. Eat, breathe, sleep in that conceptual cave until you can emerge like some diabetic bear.
This Bear…
One of the most difficult things is being available to help friends with their work (ie. Greg, over at Electi Studio), while working on your own work. (Work, work, work…) I took about a year and a half to consult on Mike Hutchinson’s Hobgoblin, which delayed the release of Turing’s Miscellany. Of course, I would do it all again, but that extra time required to get back in the saddle needs to be considered. (A 40,000 word novella doesn’t take the same amount of time to write as a 180,000 work novel, generally, but that’s what happened.)
Another aspect of consistency is planning. If you plan to create a mythology spanning a great period of time, then every date needs to be recorded. With something on hand that’s searchable, whether or not a certain character exists, or references a certain event, can be quickly resolved, thereby maintaining the momentum. Planning a good outline ensures that the story progresses evenly from chapter to chapter. Feel free to deviate from this, obviously, but an outline allows for things like breadcrumbing, which is the act of setting up future plot events by leaving clues. When the reader realizes that so-and-so said such-and-such 200 pages before, and the other shoe just dropped, it makes you look like a genius, even though you definitely aren’t.
Lastly (tutorials come in threes!), set aside a dedicated time to write and die on that hill. Even though I am beholden to my family, my job, my church life, I still set aside about 4 hours every Saturday morning to write. I will not budge, or move on it. I don’t care if Barak Obama is in town. That’s Stuart’s time. Of course, 4 hours isn’t very much time, but it’s better than no time. Remember, even if it’s slow progress, it’s still progress.
That’s all I got for today. Enjoy your previously scheduled doom scrolling!
