Ryan M. Patrick

In my last post, I talked about abandoned projects and wasted words. I have only manage to publish a fraction of what I’ve written since I started in 2012.

But why is this the case? Why am I so inefficient?

In this post I’ll talk through some reasons as to why I think this is happening. Next one I’ll take a look at how to fix them.

Light Outlining

I’ve talked about this in previous posts, but I am an outliner, not a pantser or discovery writer. I’ve tried that method in the past and it doesn’t work for me – I need to know where I’m going. Which, given that I’m an engineer, makes sense!

But I am a very light outliner.

I really don’t put a whole lot down on paper for my outlines – just some thoughts to help me write.

And I’m starting to think that’s a mistake.

There’s benefits to my approach – I have characters behave naturally, letting my writing influence their behaviors somewhat so that they don’t feel rigidly stuck to a script (one of the main critiques of outliners). But I also skip over a lot of the tough decisions when I outline and save that for my writing. For example, in the above image, there’s almost no details of the “wild man,” the “monster,” or anything about the city of Ur or the small village!

This has caused a ton of issues in my writing, especially late in a story where I need to tie it all together. There’s an obvious fix to this but that’ll be in the next post.

Long Time to Write

This one may be unavoidable. I’m married, I’m a father of four, I work full-time and have a few other hobbies. Writing isn’t my top priority (even though I’d love it to be!). That means it takes me a long time to write. Most of my novels are year-long projects.

And I’ve found I’m not always in the same place at the end of a story as where I started. I’m not the same person, I may be at a high point or low point in my own life, or I may be overwhelmed, and my writing isn’t consistent from when I began it. There’s huge spikes in quality and plot threads get dropped. I get obsessed with a word and it dominates my writing for a month but then disappears entirely. That kind of thing.

This is an issue that I probably won’t be able to fix entirely – my life isn’t going to get any less busy – but there may be ways to mitigate it. More to come in the next post.

Scattered Attention

This is a bugaboo both in my hobbies as well as my work life. My interest jumps from topic to topic and I don’t stick with a lot of things for very long. Work is fine, I have enough innate motivation to get my stuff done because it puts food on the table for my family, but when it comes to writing I am *terrible* about getting distracted by the “shiny new idea.”

I’ll write a longer post about this at some point (I keep promising to on Twitter!) but I totally screwed up at the start of my career by having my first three published books be three different first-in-series novels. People want a series, they don’t want three “Book 1s”. They want to see the story from start to end!

In some ways, this was unavoidable, this was me learning to write.

But since I finished The Europan Deception in 2024, I’ve known it was a problem. Yet I have continued to jump around like a maniac. I wrote a draft of Crush Depth, wrote 60,000 words of Memento Vivere, wrote 4,000 words of the sequel to Trials, wrote The Saturn Anomaly, wrote another two drafts of Crush Depth, wrote 4,000 words of The Apophis Contingency, then started The Kuiper Dominion. And, even when I’m working on a project, I have 1 or 2 other ones open where I poke away at some words or chapters, not to mention the short stories I write from time to time. Not to mention the amount of time I’ve outlined or expanded an idea that’s popped into my head in the middle of the night.

This is not good for getting books published and this will be the thing I focus the most on in my next post.

Learning Process

Finally, like I alluded to in the last section, some of this is just a learning process. I am a much better writer now than I was in 2015 and even 2024. I am a better outliner, better drafter, better editor. And a lot of the pre-2020 (when I started to take it seriously) stuff was just me figuring out how things work. There’s really no way to fix this, it’s all in the past, but it is something to note. Each story I write, I’ll get better at this whole thing, and I’ll continue to improve over time.

Conclusion

Are these all of my issues? No, of course not, but these are the ones that I’ve identified as causing inefficiencies in my writing. And in the next post I’ll talk about how I will deal with these (and other) issues!