Ryan M. Patrick

2 months ago I wrote a post on inefficiency following on from a previous post on wasted words. I’ve been a very inefficient writer over the last decade – I just trashed most of a half-complete 45,000 word draft! But I’m getting better, and this is how.

Heavy Outlining

I’ll admit it – I’m lazy. When I outline, I sometimes skip over parts of my story that are going to be hard to write, either from a process or an emotion perspective (I put my heart and soul into my writing!). I leave them for later, to figure out when I’m writing, but this is starting to be a huge issue. I got 45,000 words into The Kuiper Dominion and realized that my dual-protagonist architecture wasn’t going to work because I didn’t account for the two plot threads coming together.

So, I went back to the outline.

And, to be fair, there’s huge parts that I could keep. But large parts needed to be rewritten…and that’s ok. Just another 30,000 or so words in the trash. But what I did do was flesh out the outline – particularly key chapters – to where there’s a lot more meat there, helping me solve my plot problem.

I went from:

to

And I’m no longer lost. The trick though is going to be to do this from the beginning – don’t start a project until the outline is 100% complete.

I did the same for Memento Vivere:

I was completely stuck and this got me out of the rut – I was able to complete the outline to this level and I think I’m going to rip through it later this year.

Light outlines may be great as a first pass but they do not work for me once I’m actually writing!

One Project at a Time

This is the toughest lesson for me. I cannot multitask. Whether it’s just part of my personality or just a good principle for most people I don’t know, but if my attention goes between projects I’m done. I’ve tried to do more than one multiple times and every time it just ends in a mess.

This time, it’ll be different!

1 project at a time. Editing as its own thing – don’t edit while drafting a different story. Short stories sandwiched in between novels. And – this is going to be crucial – don’t do novels that require a Pentagon prepublication review back-to-back.

This last one is new.

I’ve written about this at my end of month posts since I submitted The Saturn Anomaly to the Pentagon in September of last year, but I am beholden to their process. And sometimes – like for The Europan Deception – it’s short; that one took less than 30 days. Others like Lag Delay took over a year. And it sucks to wait that long, especially when I have two novels (the aforementioned The Saturn Anomaly and Crush Depth) edited and with covers, ready to go. My sales aren’t as good this year as they were last year and that makes sense, I haven’t had a release in 12 months. But alternating between Pentagon-approval-needed novels and non-Pentagon-approval-needed novels will let me not have this queue of novels that are just sitting and waiting to be released.

So my next few projects are going to be:

1. The Kuiper Dominion (sci-fi thriller)
2. “The Lorenz Gap” (short story)
3. Memento Vivere (urban/contemporary fantasy)
4. “The Chrono-Weaver’s Tale” (short story)
5. The Apophis Contingency (sci-fi thriller)
6. Some other short story
7. Black Sails & Sorcery (historical fantasy)
8. Some other short story
9. Sensor Overload (technothriller)

I can’t trust the Pentagon process. Even though I’m obviously not revealing anything classified (unless there’s a Black Knight satellite or giant sentient mosasaurs that they’re protecting!) it just takes a while.

The other things I identified as wasting words – taking a long time to write and the learning curve of becoming a better writer – I won’t be able to fix.

This has been an incredibly helpful self-analysis and I hope at least some part of it helps someone else – every writer is different and it takes a long time to build up the right process for consistent output!