This isn’t my advice. I actually found out about this from James Ray Tuck, Jr. on Facebook. I totally love him for posting about it.
First let me say, the way James said, there is NO gimmick. It’s just brutal honesty and learning to organize yourself. Everything she says makes sense, even for a major pantser like me. I waste a HUGE amount of time waiting for inspiration to run me over with a Mack truck. No more. I have too many books that need writing to keep going the way I am.
If you feel the way I do, give her blog post a looksie. Also, if you have issues with a black background and white writing like me, I suggest copy-and-pasting into a TXT file. Her information is too priceless to pass up just because of her color scheme choices.
Some may see this as a contradiction of my earlier post entitled “Write It How You Want.” I see it as an augmentation. The reason I write scenes as they come to me is because those scenes are totally hashed out by the time I get to the computer so they go the fastest. Connecting those scenes to the story goes a lot slower.
I once dropped 6K on a story in only a few hours when I woke up with inspiration. At that time, I knew how the entire scene would play out (though not the full details). It was just a matter of writing it. If I could apply that same drive to an entire book, thus finishing a 90-100k novel in two weeks instead of three to five months, I’m all for it.