Shall We Play a Game?

Shall We Play a Game?

Teaching

For the last few days, I’ve been trying to come up with a way to “gamify” my novel writing process. To give each day’s writing session a strategic goal. A certain number of pages, or words, or time spent. During October and November 2010, my goal was 850 new words a day–every day–and this period of sustained productivity was deeply satisfying. In a short period of time, I drafted an extremely rough 175 pages of my novel.

My progress lately, however, has been more difficult to measure, to quantify. Every day, I edit and shape the those pages I generated in the fall. Every day, I feel as though I’ve gained a little a little more insight into my character, into the book’s themes, and how the book will be shaped. But strangely, these achievements towards quality feel less satisfying to me than when I was focused strictly on quantity. So I decided to go back and reflect on this post, written during that period of high productivity. Continue reading

The Gamification of Novel Writing

The Gamification of Novel Writing

Teaching
For twenty years, my writing practice had no structure. I wrote when inspired and I would keep writing until I wasn’t inspired. If I didn’t have a big block of time, I wouldn’t write. I waited until I did have a big block of time–which happened…oh…never.

I was 25 years old, two years into an MFA program, and I still acted (without really realizing it) as if writing was something I did “for school.” And then one fall, the buzz among all students in my program was that Inman Majors had returned from summer break with a 200-page manuscript, a rough draft of a novel. Of course, we all hated him immediately.

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