khiemtran | Extrusion

For me, getting decent wordcount happening is a process more like extrusion than anything else. It's about taking the original idea and stretching it out, so it's thin enough to fit through the prose on the page. It's about realising that the other cool ideas that arrive while I'm writing it won't all fit side-by-side. It's about realising that I can't make a single passage do everything at once and about concentrating on just a few things at a time.

I used to be vaguely sceptical about the advice that every part of the story had to do two things, until I realised that it worked for me from the other direction - the hard bit was limiting my ambitions to just two things (or three or four). If my prose reads fast enough, the ideas can be wider spaced and they'll still come off the page at the same rate,