Make Ready to Write

Why it’s worth taking time to prepare for the battle ahead

You’ve got something you want to write. Maybe it’s already taken form in your head as a novel or script. Or maybe it’s just a story burning inside of you, and you’re not really sure what it will ultimately become. But whether it’s from personal experience or something sprung from your imagination, the hard part is taking it from idea to page.

Inspiration is a lot like courtship. You flirt with a lot of ideas, maybe some you love, but, eventually, one comes along that’s different. It’s The One. That idea that you can really see yourself settling down with and seeing through till The End.

When that happens, it’s magical.

But while finding that special idea is exhilarating, getting through that first draft is anything but. Especially if it’s one of your first major writing projects. Writing an entire book or script is a long slog that is rarely easy or straightforward. You’re going to have to battle procrastination, fear, doubt and even the story itself to take your idea and make it into a real draft that you can do something with.

Inspiration is your creative brain in perfect harmony.

But the actual writing process?

That, my friends, is war.

There’s a long, hard campaign between now and when you type The End. But don’t despair! With the right plan of attack, you’ll be ready to fight your way through whatever this story throws at you and see this through to victory.

So strap in. Rally the troops. And get set to do this thing because it’s time to Make Ready to Write!

“Ugh, by prep do you mean outline?”

No, I don’t actually.

This guide is fully pantser / discovery writer friendly as a majority of what we’re going to cover doesn’t require you to plan your entire story ahead of time. You can do some prep and still leave room for the joy of discovery in the creative process. Even if you prefer to write by the seat of your pants, there is still plenty you can do to prepare both your writing project and yourself while leaving room for improvisation during the actual drafting.

And if you do enjoy plotting everything down to the last detail before you start? Well, we’re going to cover multiple strategies for that too. There are plenty of ways to plan all or part of your story almost none of which look like that boring outline they made you do in high school.

Make Ready to Write… what?

This is a guide for anyone getting ready for a major writing project. Doesn’t matter if it’s a script, novel, memoir, biography, self-help book, collection of poems or comic book. It can be a screenplay you’re planning to shop to a major studio or a fanfic you’ll only ever show your three closest friends. Whatever you’re looking to write, you’ll find plenty here to get you ready for the journey you’re about to take.

Throughout this book, I will refer to whatever you’re working on as your story, book or draft for simplicity, but understand this is a catch-all to mean whatever it is you are writing. While there are specific sections later on that apply to certain types of writing and genres, you’ll find that nearly every exercise in this book will work for any writing project.

More Than One Way to Win a War

With this book, as with all writing advice, take everything with the following caveat: what works for others may not work for you. And that’s fine! As author C. J. Cherryh says, “Follow no rule off a cliff.” Your writing process is personal and tailored to exactly the person you are. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to writing. If a bit of advice feels wrong or doesn’t work for you, you can safely discard it.

That said, I am a big believer in at least trying everything once, even if I suspect it’s not for me. Author Chuck Wendig calls this “now you must fight the bear,” where the bear is how you already like to write. If the new method can’t beat the bear and you decide what you were doing before was better, you can safely discard the new advice. But sometimes the new technique will surprise you and defeat your old habits, giving you a new and better way through.

So try stuff out. Experiment. The one sure thing with writing is that no two projects want to be written exactly the same way. It’s never a bad idea to have another technique in your back pocket for the inevitable moment when your usual methods fail.

Disclaimer

We’re all living our unique lives under wildly different circumstances. From neurodivergencies and disabilities to cultural or economic disparity, no two of us are living the same life. As such, not every suggestion here will be universal. Understand that these tips come from my own non-typical perspective, made up of things that have helped me and other writers I know prepare to write, but they cannot assume every eventuality.

Why prep before writing?

There are a few excellent reasons to do some prep work before you write.

Something to fall back on

For even the most seasoned professionals, there is a moment in every project when they stall out. Writing something as long as a book or full-length script is mentally draining and physically exhausting. Taking the time to do some prep ensures you have something to fall back on when your draft-dead brain can’t figure out what happens next.

When you’re in the thick of writing your draft, sometimes having that detail a better rested you took the time to prep is the difference between keeping the words coming and quitting entirely.

Less likely to get blocked

Almost every time you get stuck as a writer, it’s because you’re missing information.

Whether it’s about the characters, their motivation, their setting, the world-building, or something else entirely, often the reason you can’t move forward with your story is because you’ve overlooked something that informs what happens next. And while you’ll never be able to anticipate everything you’re going to need to know for this draft, the more you figure out ahead of time, the less likely you’ll get blocked because you don’t know enough.

Keep your forward momentum

Like winning a war, emerging victorious from a big writing project often comes down to endurance.

You’ll need to outrun your fears and doubts. To keep pouring the words out onto the page so that you run out of story before you run out of steam. The longer a project takes, the harder it is to maintain enthusiasm for it.

Which is why the more often you have to stop writing to figure something out, the more likely you are to quit. And even if you stopped writing with the best intentions, anytime you’ve arrested your forward progress, you risk never restarting. Every detail you take a moment to figure out now is another time you won’t have to pause your forward progress when in the thick of drafting.

It’s about stopping now to think it through so you don’t have to stop later.

A fuller well

When creatives take the time to consume other art, it refills their creative well. In other words, reading books, watching movies, or seeing a show all give you new stimuli from which your brain can create art. A fuller well means your imagination has more to draw from when it needs an idea and fertile ground for inspiration to grow. A well-hydrated flowerbed will always grow more than a barren field of dry dust.

When you prep your writing project, you are filling the creative well for your own story. Ideas grow more easily because you’ve seeded the ground with potential. During the actual writing, even if you’re inventing plot details on the fly, it’s informed and enriched by this bed of work you did ahead of time.

Less revision

If you’ve never revised something as long as a book, you may not be prepared for what an ordeal it can be. It’s not uncommon for writers to have to completely rewrite their book while revising, rearranging entire sections and hacking away others.

But while a lot of the revision process is unavoidable, many of the most painful edits are because there is an issue with the overall structure of the plot, characters or both. This Big Picture is hard to focus on while you’re in the daily drafting trenches, just trying to hammer out the next scene. But the prep stage gives you a unique chance to see the whole battlefield before you’re entrenched.

The more of these Big Picture issues you catch now, the less painful the editing process will be later.

Makes the task less daunting

Let’s face it, the blank page is terrifying. Writing something as big as a full-length script or book is a big deal, and it’s normal to be intimidated by the prospect. But taking time to prepare can take some of the fear out of the equation. You’re not just jumping into the darkness without a plan; you’ve at least thought this through!

Ease yourself into your story

I’ve always found that no matter how terrified I am to start a project, once everything’s prepped and ready, I can’t help but get excited about the work ahead. Spending some time with the characters and world of your story before you actually start writing helps ease you into your story. It gives you a way to dip your toe into your story world and get comfortable there before you’re expected to churn out pages.

Ideally, you’ll end your prep time feeling confident in your story and excited to finally get down to writing!

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.

Louis Simpson

Work With, Not Against Your Inspiration

The Blogging / Mailing List Conundrum

The number one thing people have been asking of me for years now is an actual regular newsletter. And I always demurred because I used to blog So Often (in The Before Times, I used to blog five times a week across my two different blogs, and that was WAY too much, no one should blog that much) and wasn’t that basically just like a newsletter?

And then, of course, I suffer from “but I don’t want to bother people!” syndrome where I have Catholic guilt every time I send out an email blast… even though you’re all people who specifically signed up to hear from me.

This put me into a chicken and egg situation where I couldn’t figure out how to serve those two masters: people who wanted regular updates and writing articles from me and people who just wanted the headlines only (new writing classes, book release, sales, etc).

Should I send out a newsletter weekly? Monthly? Only as-needed? As I waffled back and forth between which way to lean, I simply posted nothing for a long while because I got in my head about it.

I miss blogging.

I miss chatting with you all.

Most importantly, I LIKE sharing writing articles and craft tips and I hated I no longer had a good way to do it.

I needed to find an option that worked for everyone.

Welcome to the hybrid solution!

I never really liked Brevo so I’m ditching it. I’ve already got a space here that I control fully and I already mention everything newsworthy on the blog anyway, why not simplify my life and consolidate!

Blog? Newsletter? What am I looking at here?

Both! WordPress now has the capacity to serve as a Substack-like mailing list so I’ve just decided that we’ll merge the two.

This is my blog.

It’s now also my newsletter.

Beyond keeping everything in-house and only having to update one location (easier for me!), what I love the most about this is that Jetpack gives you, the reader, total control over your subscription!

• Choose how you get posts! Get posts via email, the WordPress app where you already read your other subscribed blogs or just log into the website and read in your browser when you see me mention something that looks interesting on social media. Choices! As long as you’re signed up as a subscriber, you can choose how you read updates instead of being stuck with email as your only option.
• Choose whether you get emails as they happen or digested weekly or monthly. This is my favorite feature of all because it’s the solution to my email frequency dilemma! I don’t have to worry about sending too many emails because YOU, dear reader are in control of how often you get posts. So I can frolic as chaotically as I wish across the blog and post whenever I want and you can decide whether you want to get posts live as-they-happen or digested later to fit your schedule. So the people who only want a monthly newsletter get their monthly newsletter and I don’t have to overthink whether I’m posting too often.

This also gives me the flexibility to still update the blog regularly, but also nest subscriber only content in the middle of posts for everyone. The best of both words! There will also be subscriber only posts where I can talk a little bit more about the behind the scenes type stuff I don’t necessarily want to broadcast to everyone.

And, of course, it’s WAY easier for us to have conversation since the comment section is already built right in!

Frequency

While I would ultimately like to promise a regular update schedule, right now I’m just aiming for at least one proper article up monthly and then we’ll see where we got from there.

Yes, Free!

Right now, the subscriber method is just so I can make certain content exclusive to my most devoted readers without having to worry about it going out to everyone or being scraped for AI training. I have no plans to charge or monetize anything yet and– even if I do– I will still always offer a free option.

We’ll figure it out together

I expect there will be a bit of a learning curve as I figure out what works best because I’m used to blogging one way and doing mailing list posts another and now I have to merge the two but I, for one, am excited about the possibilities this opens up!

(And also, don’t worry, they won’t all be this long! I just had a lot of business to cover for the first edition!)

As part of this new process, I’ll be starting a few different blog series that we’ll cycle between from week to week. Some of the ones I’ve got planned are…

• The Next Write Thing: tips for writing in a world gone mad
• What Works For Me: Strategies I’ve implemented in my writing life I want to share in case you find them helpful too!
• Get It Writ: Join me as I test out major productivity methods and see how they could apply to writing
• Behind the Scenes: Backstage candid stuff about the writing world that I don’t necessarily want to share with the entire internet
• Tools of the Trade: In dept reviews of writing services and software
• …and then update posts that are more of your typical newsletter-y content at least quarterly just so you know what I’m up to!

To that end, here’s more of a personal update to what’s been happening with me:

What I’ve been up to…

Bookkeeping logistics nightmare. WaveApps is changing their payment structure on June 1st and taking away automatic bank transaction import for free accounts. Since both my companies use them for bookkeeping / invoicing and paying double for a service that didn’t really serve my needs was NOT desirable, I lost a whole day of writing to trying to find a solution. After trying ZipBooks, ZohoBooks and GnuCash (all of which had their strengths, but none of which could do automatic imports from both PayPal and Chase Bank like I needed), I finally found a simple solution in the combo of BanktoSheets (which is a mere $5 a month for up to five bank connections aka FAR cheaper than paying for two accounts on Wave/Zip/Zoho/et al) and the free Wave Connect plugin for Google Sheets.

So if anyone else is going through that same struggle, hopefully knowing about those options upfront will save you some time!

What even is comfort, really? Long term readers will remember I have joint issues and I’ve been going through the arduous process of trying to upgrade my writing set-up to be more ergonomic. Changing so many things at once is mostly making me feel like I am losing my mind trying to figure out if this way is better, worse, or if I have never actually experienced comfort in my life.

At some point, I’d like to do a big breakdown of everything I discovered during this process and exactly what I ended up with, but I’m going to live with this current set up for a while and make sure this actually works long term before I do. If you had asked me 48 hours ago, I would have told you my current set up was perfect… except today my wrist is randomly hurting and I’m just sitting here like whyyyy which part of this is the problem when will I know peace??

I’ve been cheating on you. So there is an elephant in the room we might as well address right up front: I have started a few secret pen names that I am not going to share on here. The why is very simple: branding and the fact that most of what I write under my real name is either all ages or skews young and people get cranky if perceived “kids” authors write something a little more adult. No, it shouldn’t be like that but, yeah, it still is.

Someday I might just put that writing side by side on this site but, for now, I need to keep those disconnected.

This has left me in a weird situation, though, because one of the things I always used to do on this blog was be completely transparent about my writing process and how my various drafts were going and, if I’m going to keep doing that, I’m going to have to become vague about exactly what I’m working on. Suffice it to say I AM still writing at the usual ludicrous volume, have lots of extremely cool stuff in various states of completion, but (for the foreseeable future anyway) you’ll have the somewhat jarring experience of me talking about all these novels I am clearly writing while it looks like I have nothing to show for it on this blog specifically.

Blog clean up in progress! As part of making this switch from just a blog to blog and newsletter both, I’m doing a big clean up of old posts. This blog is actually a horrifying Frankenstein of my old Geocities, Tripod/Lycos AND Blogger blogs all smashed together and a big clean up of old posts is FAR overdue. (Don’t worry, I kept an archive of everything! It will just live offline.) As part of this, I may shamelessly clean up some of my older post and repost them new because there’s a lot of good content buried in my back catalog and it’s really hard to find right now.

Tho I’m STILL trying to find a solution for posting series that I like…

In Progress

• Publication for The Raven / Lenore which I’m excited to get out there since it’s fast becoming one of my most requested short plays
• The next How to Start Writing book. Now that Make Ready to Write is finally getting out the door, it’s time to look ahead! My original plan was to focus next on the editing book (which will replace NaNo Now What, more on that in a future post!), but I think it might make more sense to make the writing productivity book #3 since that fits the flow of the series better. Either way, both of those are close to ready to roll and so my hope is to have the next two books in that series out soon.
• Multiple very cool novels in various states of completion I can talk about sorry because they are for my secret penname, but arghhh they are so good, I can’t wait for people to read them!

Feel free to leave a comment on this post to let me know which one you’d be the most interested in seeing!

Oh and if you’re just viewing this on the blog or came from social media and want to make sure you can always see subscriber only content in the future, you can sign up for a free account below!