How was your weekend writing?

I thought it might be a fun exercise to keep a diary of sorts about my weekend writing schedule.

I made this a bullet points throughout the day, then typed it up properly after.

First things first, I don’t know how/if this will work.

It may turn out to be little more than an elaborate procrastination technique, and let’s face it, no one would be less surprised by that than I.

Regardless, the plan is to make brief notes throughout the day, in between my scheduled tasks, so that I can look back at it later and see if my writing retreat schedule actually works. If it keeps me on track, or if I just ignore it to scroll through Twitter (also, no one would be less surprised than me).

10am: get up, get showered, brush teeth, eat breakfast, drink coffee, turn on PC.

Well, right off the bat I broke from the written because I didn’t fancy writing at my desk today, so instead of turning on my PC, I turned on my laptop. I mean, come on, it’s Saturday morning — is it any wonder I wanted to write from bed?

I had a shower last night, so I can leave that until later. Maybe I’ll have a bath and watch Chinese dramas to celebrate doing some writing. Anyway, I’ve made breakfast, chucked a load of washing on and hung it out, so I’m ahead of that game on that. Slightly stressed that there’s loads of washing up to do, and the flat looks generally untidy, but since I’m choosing to work from bed, I don’t have to look at it. Also, my boyfriend is rumbling sleepily next to me as he only got home in the wee hours from the pub. It feels nice, like Saturday should feel.

I’ve put my headphones on with a soundscape from YouTube, this one’s “rain in a forest” noises. Lovely. About to put my laptop in Focus Mode (I am terrible at checking emails as they pop up, which is v. distracting) and get on with the day.

11am: review goals for the weekend and make plans for each writing sprint

Alright, so in the first hour I forgot to put my phone on “do not disturb” as well as putting my laptop on focus, so I got distracted a couple of times by messages but still made good headway. I will say I was glad to have this first writing hour to re-acquaint myself with the story, because it’s a but unlikely I’d have been able to dive in with a 500-word sprint immediately.

12pm: write 500 words

At the end of that I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve done much new writing. A couple of sentences, certainly not 500 words, and yet my wordcount has increased drastically. Why, you ask? Because I remembered I actually have an old draft of this novel from a few years ago.

I often need time to percolate my ideas, I think — All Hell has been with me since I was 16, after all, and I think this story idea might be from… 2009, originally? So I have old notes and scene outlines from a previous iteration of it. Now, reading that back is painful, because thankfully my writing has improved since then, but there are some really helpful notes and ideas in there!

So, this hour I have achieved a lot in terms of pulling the jigsaw together, I think. With the notes from the old draft I probably have about 50% of the word count I will eventually need to tell this story, although much of it is bedraggled and frayed at the edges so needs lots and lots of work before I can let anyone else get sight of it.

I was starting to feel overwhelmed by how much text there actually is and how much story I have left to tell towards the end of the hour, so I spent some time splitting the text over three documents, mimicking the three parts of the book. That way I can treat each segment (roughly 30-35k each) as a separate entity, which feels less impossible.

1pm: make and eat lunch, put some laundry on

Here is where the day started to get away from me a bit. I wasn’t hungry at 1, so I didn’t want to stop and cook, and I already did a load of washing this morning! So I made some minor recalculations and powered on until 2pm with my re-organising project instead.

That’s the benefit of giving myself an hour to do things that should take 30 mins (like, write 500 words) — flex when I get distracted or things get away from me. Now that I’ve organised my manuscript and started pulling together an outline I’m beginning to feel like I’ve written a fractured landscape of islands across a wide river, and now need to figure out their geography so I can write the bridges between them.

2pm: write 500 words

Well, obviously, I didn’t do this because of the above. Instead, at 2pm I washed up and put some more washing on while food was cooking and now I have a cup of tea (that I didn’t even have to make! Bliss).

Technically I’m supposed to take yet another break at 3, but instead I’ll be reviewing my synopsis, to try and figure out those bridges and islands (and also because I said I’d send one to my agent, and very conspicuously haven’t).

I’m also trying to decide if it’s worth the hassle to print out what I have of Part One or not — sometimes I use a printed copy as major procrastination, so I need to decide if I really need it.

3pm: have a break, move a bit, drink tea

God I hate writing synopses.

3:25pm

Like, seriously hate writing synopses.

5:30pm

I did it though — it evidently took longer than an hour, but I’ve sent it over to a writing friend to see if it actually makes sense to anyone outside of me and I’m proud that I got it done. That alone feels like a massive achievement, and it’s definitely resolved some of those islands-and-bridges. Just another 30 mins of tidying up and getting things ready for my day tomorrow and then I’m going to knock off, cook dinner and finally hang that wet washing out.

Overview of the day

Well, I didn’t entirely follow the plan. I’ve clearly put my food breaks too close together, because when 1pm rolled around I wasn’t hungry enough for lunch, which isn’t surprising given I ate breakfast at 10am. I ended up rolling together some of my writing sessions because I just didn’t want to stop, and to compensate for my hunger/lack thereof.

I also finished up at 6pm instead of 7pm, but I reckon I worked solidly enough that I’ve hit my goals. It’s hard to say, because not a lot of new words actually got written today, but my manuscript feels more manageable, and I wrote both a scene-by-scene outline and a 1.5 page synopsis, which will be really useful for glancing at as I go forward.

I also cooked twice, washed up and did two loads of laundry, so I really can’t be annoyed at myself for lack of productivity I don’t think!

It will be interesting to see how I get on tomorrow — I’m considering making a TikTok version of what I’ve done today, just to see what that’s like. Obviously, I don’t want to record everything I do ever because that’s eventually just going to get in the way, but I’ve enjoyed this today and look forward to reading it back in a few months when I’m (hopefully) way further along!

For future, I might re-jig my timings a bit. 15-minute writing sprints with 5-minute breaks, 3 times in an hour? Different meal times to be a bit more realistic? We’ll see.

I hope this has been even a little bit interesting/edifying. I feel good, although of course my inner critic is already telling me I didn’t actually create anything new today. Which just means I really will have to tomorrow, or else I’ll put myself in a terrible mood, and I can’t be doing with that.