Writing Methodologies

Got this little meme from Diana Pharaoh Francis and it looked like fun.

How do you do it? By this I mean a bit about your process. Do you work off of a "pages per day" kind of deal--with a bare minimum of what you need to do for the day to be accomplished? A word count? Plot? Ive heard different people do it different ways. Laurell K. Hamilton:4 pages a day, Stephen King: 2,000 words. I've been on a 1,000 a day kick and I've found it good for me (actually, a friend and I challenge one another to see how much we can write in twenty minutes, it's kind of fun...but I digress)

part two of the question formatting -- what does yours look like? When you're working on a work-in-progress. Times new roman? double space? single?

Its kind of a weird question but when i see someone say, "i write five pages a day" Courier New and Times New Roman are pretty different.

Can you shed some light on your writerly ways?

For me, I'll start with the font. Courier New at 12 point font, double-spaced, zoomed up to 300%. I like the typewriter look to the font and it is the font I'm most comfortable with. I keep the zoom up high to make me focus on the words I'm writing, not the paragraph before or after. Just kind of like a "Now" thing when I write. I also use "web view" (or Normal in Word) so it doesn't scroll. I also use exactly 1" margins on all sides, with a header and footer of 0.2". (As a slight comment, for some reason, I dislike Times New Roman intensely.)

When I write novels, I use one file per chapter because OpenOffice.org sometimes burps on the very long documents. I have a master document which includes all the chapters, so when I open it, it slurps in all the chapters and formats them properly. It also lets me backup stuff and see how I'm doing; I can write a program to process counts per chapter or to see if I have notes to myself. I use the "Notes" paragraph style for TODOs and WTFs, then have a program that finds them and puts them in a list. Makes it easier when dealing with 30-50 chapters.

As for goals, I use hours. I write at a relatively steady pace, about 2k words per hour, so I try to write for at least an hour. Given that I write for two, the rest of it is for playing games, browsing the web, and trying to gather my thoughts together. My best rate is 4k words per hour, but I burn out pretty heavily. When I did DL, I aimed for a chapter a day. In reality, what happened was I wrote 2-3 chapters, then wrote nothing for a few days, then rinse, lather, and repeat. So, basically I keep my goals on a week level, such as 10k words in a week. That handles my ebbs and flows of creativity, coupled with all my other projects. *cough*

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