Catching you up
My sleep troubles are pretty much behind me and I'm surprised how my life has improved. The key was to turn down the lights progressively during the night, dim the screens and use a blue blocker later. Then have lights out a little more than an hour before turning in, during which I use no screens. It works.
Today, my novel writing went off the track, but I have nobody to blame but myself for that. (Damn Twitter! Damn Trump!) It means I'll have to put in extra time and skip my writers' group meeting. After I'm done with this post and report it my FB timeline, I'm going to watch John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. May as well get some recreation in, along with some story education. I'll be more productive tomorrow.
The writing has been going well overall, however. Part of the reason is I've formulated a writing method that's effective and surprisingly productive. It's painstaking, but it prevents me from going back and making changes ad-infinitum, so in the end it will save me time.
I've noticed that writers will give advice about a lot of things with their craft, getting ideas, editing, format, but I've found very little said about how they turn an idea into crafted, coherent stories. So, I've come up with a method that's helped me. Now, I give all steps I recommend below, but it doesn't mean you have to follow them strictly. You could shortcut, especially under deadline. I'd likely do that, so consider this to be a method in development.
Everything below assumes that you know the rules of grammar, can recognize a good sentences and paragraphs. You're just need to know how to generate them.
Haines' method for writing novels, short stories and nonfiction:
1) Write at least one page of raw text to begin your story. (Write more if you're inspired.) Harlan Cobin has said anything you put on the page is good, what's bad is a blank page. He's right. Get some ideas on it quick.
2) Go back to the first page, first sentence. Highlight it.
3) Read it silently, then aloud.
4) Make corrections and revisions you find necessary. Add or delete material if that's necessary.
5) With every change made or error corrected repeat steps 2-4.
6) Repeat steps 2-5 on every sentence in the paragraph until you see no more changes are necessary.
7) When you're done with the sentence stage, highlight the whole paragraph. Read it silently and aloud.
8) Make corrections and revisions. Add or remove material as you see fit to tell your story.
9) With every change, repeat step 7-8 as needed until you deem no other improvements are needed.
10) Change the paragraph font into a distinctly different one.*
11) Repeat steps 7-9 with the new font.
12) Change the paragraph into white text on a black background, i.e in “dark mode.**
13) Repeat steps 7-9 in your second font in dark mode. Keep going until you're out of changes and corrections.
14) Turn off dark mode, change the text back to your first font. You're done with a whole paragraph!
15) Repeat steps 2-14 on every paragraph consecutively on the page. You can also split or combine paragraphs for sharper emphasis and more coherence. Or you might discover it's not needed or redundant and then delete it.
16) When you reach the end of the page, read the whole thing, silently and aloud. Make improvements and corrections if they're needed.
17) If you make a change or correction, reread the paragraph it's in, silently and aloud.
18) Change the font. Change the page to dark mode.
19) When you can find no other improvements, take it out of dark mode, change the font back. You're done with a page!
20) Repeat steps 2-19 on every page. Until you're done, exhausted, or insane.
And that's it. Now I go In the Mouth of Madness.
*A writer misses his or her mistakes when editing work mostly because their too familiar with the text. Put it into an unfamiliar form and you will catch more mistakes. I change Times New Roman to Arial Black. That may not be your choice, just as long as the changed font is very distinct from your original without being unreadable.
**The dark mode makes the text much more distinct for editing. I use an app call CareUEyes for dark mode. It's found at the Microsoft Store, costs about $3. I actually bought it as a blue-light blocker, but it turned out to have a “Editing” mode as well, which puts your screen in dark mode. Without an app, you can still do this in both Word and Openoffice, but it is slower and a bit more complicated. Given how painstaking this process is, you don't want those.
