If you were following me on Twitter last night, you probably saw me talking about writing surges.  I’m not going to claim to have invented this idea, far from it, I’ve seen similar events both on preset schedules and spur of the moment around the internet, taking several forms.  1 hour writing sprints.  15 minute surges.  People who’ll start each hour with the plan to write x words and then take the rest of the hour off.

Never tried them.  Gotta say, though…I liked them.

For my purposes the surges were 15 minutes of writing, following by 30-45 minutes of allowed not writing.  This works well for me, as it forces me to be super focused for a period, but then allows me some guilt free periods of goofing off.  In that way I did two 15 minute surges and a 10 minute surge (third surge was cut short when I ended the first draft of the story I was working on).  They produced 631, 756, and 426 words for a total of 1813.  Not bad for only 40 minutes of actual writing time.

Now, obviously they only work for stories with a known direction, but for that they ended up working damn well.  There’s also the very real fact that only 100 of these surges would result in a novel-length manuscript.  100 might seem like a lot, but fit in three a night and that’s a month.  That’s Nanowrimo.

So I’ll be doing these again in the future, and with a little more warning in hopes that people can join me.  Probably for the next short story, a concept I got from the least likely Balticon panel to result in a plot concept.

And with this post, that’s it for August.  It’s been a fast month, but a pretty good one.  Look for State of the Writer sometime tomorrow.