 Hello everybody here. Welcome back to from the desk today I'm gonna try you try to help you guys with increasing your output Things that I did either back in the day or that I still do to this day to try and write more or more often So the first thing I want to get out of the way is I don't believe in strict daily word counts That's me. I don't believe in it. It doesn't work for me. It never has There are plenty of people more analytical Minded brains than mine. I try not to think too much about the writing process So having a strict word count kills my momentum It kills my motivation So I just don't do it if you want to do it and it works for you by all means set yourself a word count goal one of the coolest pieces of advice I've ever heard is Neil Gaiman talking about Stephen King telling him That if he only writes 300 words a day by the end of a year He'd have a full-length novel and it's correct. You can do the math if you want to so the next thing I suggest is using an app Something like a righto meter That's what I use personally. You can find several up. There's several on the Google Play Store I don't know about iTunes or any of the other stuff. I personally use Google Play um It all that app that well It's a it's a very simplistic reward system You get I think guavas or something like that and you can use that to buy themes or whatever It's it's a perfluous. It means nothing. It's kind of like whose line is it anyway? The points don't matter what you're trying to do is give yourself some kind of reward for hitting either you know for hitting certain word count goals or Time words in a time frame, which I'll get to that in just a second but that Helps you have a sell more of a sense of accomplishment for what you've done And you get to watch a chart of how your writing fluctuates and how much you're How much you are writing within a certain time frame? another thing before I move on to sprinting is Joining something like nano-rimo they have camp nano-rimo in I think it's Spring I know for certain that a nano-rimo, which is national novel writing month happens in November and all that is is you have 30 days to write a 50,000 page book now camp nano-rimo You can set your word count to whatever you want to write a novella a short story whatever You can do that and then that at the end of November when you do nano-rimo the the base 50,000 words they have you return to it in January, which is something I suggest also if you're going to be writing Put it away, and then come back to it after you write something else. We'll get to that more sprinting is Very it works very well when trying to boost your output Nothing nothing any good is built in a day or in one writing session You have to build something over a course of time and with sprinting that gives you a sense of accomplishment Because if you only write 300 words the first time Maybe you write more or less the second time But that more or less is still at least one more word than you had at the beginning of the sprint I suggest sprinting for 30 minutes and no more than an hour Hour you start hitting that fatigue area 15 minutes for me seems a little It seems like I start to hit my flow right about that time Right at the fifth 10 15 minute mark is right when I start really getting into what I'm writing And then I burned through another you know at least 15 to 20 minutes after that But I always set the timer for 30 minutes if I go over that's fine But I I tried to never go under I try to never stop And that helps a lot. I am a pancer I know there's a lot of there's a lot of back and forth about whether you need to be a plotter or a pancer But it really is it's all up to you With me sprinting helps because I just sit down and like okay. I am going to word vomit for this amount of time I'm not gonna edit. I'm not gonna spell check. I'm not gonna do anything else. I'm only going to write for those 30 minutes okay, um Another important task to get you back to work the next day once again Nothing if you if you manage to write a novel in a single day I want you to holler at me and tell me how because the most words I've ever written is 27,000 words and that's novella territory It's not a novel so no book is written in a single day and you need to keep that motivation into the next day So how do you do that how I do it as I always leave something unwritten? I always leave off on a thought or a scene I never complete a scene because completing a scene from me feels like I have made it somewhere that I have achieved Something and I don't want to feel that way until I get done with the book I don't stop between projects either if I have just finished up and not not to say I don't take breaks That is that is untrue. I take breaks every now and again I'll take like a week off here a month off there whatever but I'm still writing. I mean, let's be honest. I'm still on social media still doing something I'm just not working on any big projects. I'm always putting words down, but but Continuing on if I finish a novel I jump automatically even that day the same day that I finish a novel I type the end I open up another word doc and I start writing I did whatever comes out comes out And maybe a short story novella novel whatever unless I'm contractually obligated to write something and then that's the thing that I'll write next But I will jump straight into the next thing And then once I have enough that I feel comfortable that I can leave off and that the flow is Working and that the story is going somewhere I will either slow down or I will take a little bit of break if I need one sometimes I don't need one. I've written five novels back to back to back without stopping at one point in time That's my that's the most and then I wrote some short stories in between there Not novella here and there Which is another thing I want to bring up the very next topic of discussion is going from longer works to shorter works I highly recommend and this I got I stole directly from Stephen King and it works a wonder As soon as you're done with a novel a long project whether it be novella or novel Go ahead and jump right into a short story or a novel a either one of those things You don't want any down time So that's the but the easiest way to go from you know one project to another is to go from a long to a short that way You have all that time that you have sunk into The longer work if you go from that Sense of accomplishment finishing that directly into a short story You can fool your brain into those two things equaling each other So you follow very quickly you follow one accomplishment with another and then that'll carry all the way over into Hopefully the next longer project Don't force anything so don't force that routine what I suggest is Having it be natural whatever that second thing is after the novel if it's another novel That's okay, too. Just don't lose the motivation along the way if you get stuck I guess I've said many times in this series I don't believe in writer's block if you get stuck on one project open up another project and start working on that and always Always return and finish that other one. I don't care how bad it is I don't care if you have to write if you thought it was gonna be a hundred thousand word novel And it's only thirty thousand words and you wrap it up in five thousand and have a thirty five thousand Word novella that was supposed to be a hundred thousand. That's fine. At least you ended it finish it up get it done Put it away then come back to it. Maybe it's worth revisiting when I talked about my cannibalism When in my cannibalism episode I talked about going back to something I had written ten years ago and that was something that was supposed to be a much larger project ended up I wrapped it up very shortly and I moved on ten years later. I ended up using that material Finally to increase your output. I would suggest writing in other genres Nothing is better than fresh material if you're a horror writer try writing a romance a comedy a sci-fi a fantasy whatever If you were well any genre really, you know, I always fall back on horror because that's my roots But I do write much more than horror. I just don't write it under this name Let's see here. I those are all my notes. So if you have any questions If you have any tips, especially if you have any tips for aspiring writers for veterans Anything that I didn't mention here or if you want to discuss what I mentioned here Do all that down there in the comments below, but until next time I have been a you have been you This has been another from the desk. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye. Bye