How to generate writing momentum
Writing is hard. It’s gratifying to finish a scene or chapter you’re really proud of, but all the time spent getting up to that moment is difficult. As Stephen King argues in his book, On Writing, completing a novel is a game of momentum. That’s why when he starts on a new novel, he has a strict schedule where he dedicates himself to finishing the book in 3 months or so by writing and editing many hours each day.
I remember being incredibly despondent when I read that. I’m glad that Stephen King has the ability to do that, but I don’t. I’m not a multi-millionaire. To help support my family, I have a full-time job, which I happen to really like. And I have 3 kids, two of which are still at home, and one of which has special needs. Between therapy for kid 1 and piano lessons and jazz band for kid 2, and then making dinner and taking care of the house and myself, I’m feeling pretty fortunate if I have 2 hours a day to write on an average weeknight. Plus, I dedicate one entire evening a week to spending time exclusively with my wife, which I think has served our 19-year marriage very well.
Weekends are usually better for writing, but there’s still a lot to balance—and I want to balance all of those things because they’re all important.
But the issue of momentum remains. I do agree with Stephen King that it’s important to have it, and if you can’t get it by going fast, then there’s only one other way to get it. Since momentum is velocity times mass, scientifically speaking, the other way to generate momentum is to have mass. Literarily speaking, that means you need to have an idea you’re really passionate about.
Honestly, I didn’t have that in college which is when I attempted to write my first novel. It was about 40 space colonists who all collectively have the same dream over and over of landing on their target planet and setting up their colony ahead of others arriving years later. It was a way of using the cryosleep for training, so that when they finally arrive they’ll be incredibly well-trained and efficient. But one of the colonists falls in love with another and is rebuffed by them. Spurned, the colonist acts out by killing all of the colonists, causing the cryosleep simulation to reset. Long story short, this pattern repeats itself over and over to the point that the spurned colonist doesn’t realize it when they actually arrive on the planet and continues their killing spree, dooming the colony. Pretty dark, I know.
Despite working on it for many months, I never finished it—partially because I got bogged down in the mushy middle—but more so I think because I never had a strong stake in the story. It was an interesting idea, but there wasn’t anything uniquely me in it. And at the time, I don’t think I had the emotional maturity to be introspective enough to make that kind of investment.
More than a decade later, I was at a digital marketing conference and one of the inspirational speakers was Robin Roberts. She was great and her main point was to encourage people to use their personal struggles for good. She said, “Make your mess your message.”
It’s taken me a while to act on that, but that’s what I’m trying to do now with my novels. The dystopian sci-fi trilogy I’m working on is inspired by my daughter, Samantha, who would be 18 years old if she were alive today. We lost her in the third trimester when my wife suffered a splenic artery aneurysm, which means the artery to her spleen exploded.
When that happens, it’s fatal to the baby 90% of the time and fatal to the mother 70% of time. My wife got very lucky. Our daughter didn’t.
My sci-fi trilogy is about a family decades in the future that suffers a similar loss, but the daughter that is thought to be lost isn’t dead. While separated from her parents, she lives and becomes—after many struggles—a badass. She’s the heroine of my story and, together with her partner, she saves the world from a horrible fate.
The other novel ideas I’m developing have equally personal cores that drive those stories and drive me to finish them, too. Thanks for joining me on this journey.
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