The Pact: For the next seven days, I will work on Shards of Stolen Breath (working title), a fantasy novel for children.

The Procedure: Schedule a one-hour chunk each day and write during that time.

(I’m not going to specify a particular time until the day-of. My schedule varies too much to commit to the same time each day. For instance, on Mondays, when we have dinner with my parents, writing after dinner won’t work. Also, on Tuesday of this week I played in an online game of Castles and Crusades after dinner, so that also didn’t work. Wednesday through Friday, due to the holiday and traveling, were not predictable either in the time or the energy department. Etc. etc.

Basically, picking the One True Time each day is hard and ends in failure more often than not. For this experiment, I’m trying the day-of approach to see if that works better.)

More Procedure: Use note cards to write “skeleton scenes” before actually writing.

The idea here (and I can’t remember where I first heard the term “skeleton scene”… this might necessitate a trip to my archives…) is that by sketching out quick impressions or possible details for the scene, I won’t have to stop too long to think them up as I’m writing.

This is, perhaps, a form of “outlining,” but since it’s right before I start adding words to my manuscript, and it’s very much a whatever-comes-to-mind exercise in free association, and it’s not using any parts of my critical voice, therefore it feels much more “creative voice” than not. I don’t have to write the skeleton scenes either. I can simply reread what I wrote yesterday and jump right in.

But skeleton scenes allow a gentler “on-boarding” where I don’t have to feel like the words “matter” yet. I can let ideas come to me (without editorializing) and that makes the first words I type into the manuscript less “precious.” Basically, the fear and resistance is broken down. Skeleton scenes are like stretches before a run.

More Procedure: Set the time for twenty minutes (when I really plan to write for sixty).

Twenty minutes is doable. I can write quite a bit in twenty minutes and it doesn’t seem overwhelming at the start. Also, after twenty minutes, the bell goes off on my Time Timer and I can check in with myself: Have I really been writing, or have I only been “gearing up” to write?

If I’ve only been gearing up, I can get down to brass tacks in the next twenty-minute session and “open the document and stay in the document.”

And after that session, I know I only have to push through one more twenty-minuter and I’ll have met my pact agreement for the day.

If I set the timer for sixty minutes, and I start with some journaling, skeleton scenes (or blogging… heh), the time might quickly get away from me. I’ll feel like I’m writing fiction and adding to the story, but I’m really not.

Twenty-twenty-twenty means I get a little audible check-in every twenty minutes to make sure I’m doing what I want to be doing, which is writing fiction.

More Procedure: Do not, repeat, do not focus on words written (but keep track anyway). I’m not setting a words-per-day quota. This is a time-based pact only.

But I do want to see how many words I can get written in these twenty-minute segments because I’m somewhat hopeful that my procedures here will actually engender MORE words-per-minute than I usually achieve. I don’t know why I think that, but I’m partly doing this experiment to see if my hypothesis is right.

If it is, then perhaps the secret to writing faster and getting into flow-state is buried somewhere within these procedures.

I’ll have more to report when the pact is complete.