Ryan M. Patrick

As a follow-up to my post late last year on How I Outline (one of my most popular ones!), this one will cover how I draft – get words down on (electronic, usually) paper, and the things I do to make sure that I actually can get them down. I won’t use a specific example but talk in generalities because how I draft all of my novels is roughly the same.

The Tools

I used to write in Google Docs. It was great when I was doing some writing on my home PC and some on my work laptop – having access to the same file at multiple locations is a huge time saver. And the collaboration tools are top-notch as well. I still use it to gather alpha and beta feedback.

However, something I learned with The Martian Incident and Lag Delay is that Google Docs is awful from a formatting standpoint. Both books took months to get the markup right in Kindle Create and have a professional-looking finished product.

So, in late 2023/early 2024, I switched to Microsoft Word with OneDrive as my cloud backup/sync solution. It works a thousand times better once the right “styles” are set up and I’ve found the spelling/grammar checker to be far superior to Docs’. So Word it is! Nice to use my day-to-day tool at work as the same thing I write in.

I’ve also tried Scrivener in the past but didn’t really like it. Wasn’t worth the cost.

The Timing

I’m a busy guy. I work a 50ish hour a week job and am married with four kids and a dog. I don’t have a whole lot of time to write.

When I am able to, it’s generally one of two times – either on my lunch break at work or at night after my daughters go to bed. I’m generally more productive in the former – especially after I’ve had a beer or glass of wine! – but I get fewer of those evenings as my girls get older. Instead, I have trained myself to knock out 500ish words in 30-60 minutes at lunch. I wrote a bit about this in my writing journey post – at my first assignment at WPAFB, everyone else went out to lunch except me, leaving me along in the converted hangar to stumble through some writing.

There’s exceptions though. Wife takes the girls out to see Moana 2? Write. Wake up an hour before anyone else in the house? Walk the dog and then write. Take a kid to an appointment or swim lesson? You guessed it – write!

The Actual Writing

I don’t know if other writers do this or not, but given that I’m a plotter, I generally know where my story is going and when I actually get the time to get words down they come out quickly.

I shoot for about 5-6000 words a week, usually on 2 to 3 projects at a time. I can’t stay on one, as much as I want to or try to, it just doesn’t work for me. I have at least one novel and one short story going at any given moment and can skip between them when I get stuck.

I don’t really get writers’ block. Haven’t in years. I can get stuck on a project, but then I’ll work on a different one. I have very few days where I don’t get much done.

When I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll. I’ve had 3-4000 word days before where I have free time and the creative juices are flowing. However, there’s also rough days that cancel that out.

I track my writing progress in Excel.

It lets me see if there’s any trends with my writing. I’ve noticed that I write best early in the week and on the weekends, with Thursday and Friday being my weakest days.

I write on my work laptop, my personal laptop (Chromebook), and my desktop PC. OneDrive lets me sync between them pretty easily.

I generally write in 50-100 word chunks where I just go, go, go before I have to stop for a breath. Chain enough of those together and you’ve knocked out a chapter or two.

Hope this was helpful! It’s one data point, but maybe something in here helps someone who’s still starting out their writing journey. I’ll do an editing post, and probably a publishing post, later this year.