- Anna Maria Junus
Book Review: 2,000 to 10,000 by Rachel Aaron
Sub-title: How to write faster, write better, and write more of what you love.
Rachel begins her book explaining that she went from writing 2000 words a day to 10,000 without increasing her writing time. Now bear in mind, she’s a full time writer. Not everyone can devote six hours a day to writing. So realize, that you’ll have to adjust your expectations according to how much time you can devote to writing.
She takes us through her process of discovering what worked for her in increasing her word count.
Basically it comes down to outlining and she tells you how to do that. She increased her word count because she knew ahead of time exactly what she was going to write about.
Personally, I’m a pantser, which means that when I sit down to write, I may have an idea what to write about, but I have no outline, no preconceived notion of where I’m going, or if I do know that, I don’t know how I’m going to get there. There’s no notes jotted anywhere. No bullet points. Nothing. In school when I was taught about outlining a story before writing it, I would write the story first and then do the outline. Sure it was cheating, but I didn’t like the outlining process. I liked the discovery process. Outlining seemed to me like telling the story already, without the fun of not knowing what was happening next. After all, when I read a book, I don’t want to know what happens in it. I want to discover it as I read. I want to discover as I write too.
Now I’m not saying that’s the only right way to do things. That’s the way I do things. I think outlining is a great tool if that’s what works for you. And in the last book I wrote during Nano, I discovered that I had to do some amount of outlining when I stalled out a bit.
Having everything figured out before you do it is an extremely useful skill, and Rachel Aaron shows you how she does it.
This book is a keeper. As I plan more and more my writing strategies, I’m finding that lists help and perhaps I will one day be using outlines to write my books. Probably not detailed ones – one of my favorite authors Phyllis A. Whitney also put out a book on writing “How to Write Fiction” that was all about her outlining process. She outlines in such detail that by the time she sits down to write she’s just connecting the dots.
As a pantser, these books are helpful to me. Even if never use all the techniques, some of them are useful. She has a tracking table that is valuable. On it you list the date, times of day, number of words written and where you were when you wrote. You can actually see when your most effective time of day is. You may discover that you’re a morning writer and you can focus your writing in the morning, saving your other writing duties to other times of the day.
Rachel goes further into the process by explaining editing as well, that job you do after you’ve written that first draft. Some writers love this process, others like me, find it a bit of a chore. However you feel about it, it has to be done.
Put this book on your writing shelf and refer back to it over and over again.
