When is the best time to write science fiction?

100,000 words a month is your minimum goal

I thought for many newbies out there that this question might be something to consider. If you’re not yet at the stage of writing 100,000 words a month (that you can use, not including discarded words) then you might still be struggling with just being able to write, let alone when.

Professional authors who make a living from ‘pages-read’ on Amazon would have to meet at least that target every month to pay the bills. Then again, if you work in any administrative capacity, that would be how many words you would write in emails and documents every month as a matter of course. Why not do it full time writing on something you love?

So, assuming that your goal is to eventually get to 100,000 publishable words a month, when is your most productive time of the day?

Circadian Rhythm

Now we get into some interesting aspects of the circadian rhythm. Not just on your energy levels, but the chemicals in your system and your state of mind, also.

It was recently proven that human beings generally have an emotional rhythm too. We’re a lot more analytical, focused and reasoning in the morning, and a lot more emotional, unfocused and unreasoning in the evening. That means that there are at least two sides to every human being on the planet! [Study of 800 million tweets finds daily cycles of thought]

Emotional in the evening, emotionless in the morning. It probably explains some one-night-stands leaving before their hookup wakes up!

And so, if we have two noticeably different states of being day to day, how will this affect our writing, and when is the best time to write what we want to write?

Morning for…

If you need to do some major editing, cutting out paragraphs, soul searching about bits you love but aren’t suitable and bits you hate that need more work, then the morning is the best time for your analysis. I would say 6am to 10am could be your peak writing period, depending on your other responsibilities.

If you’re able to write focused, with minimum breaks, delaying breakfast, then your most productive time (productivity as measured by an editor) would be that four-hour period in the early morning.

For me, it’s not. My most productive period is between 2am and 6am, but these aren’t times suitable for the average person.

Now, just think. If your goal is 100,000 words per month, and you write at 60 words a minute, that’s 3600 words per hour, 14400 words per 4 hours, 100,800 per week! After you’ve spent researching, rereading, reediting and the like, you could easily do 100,000 publishable words a month.

How exciting!

But boring!

But, would anyone read it? If the morning is your best time to be analytical, is your fiction going to end up being something staid, boring, repetitive, and featuring dull characters traveling somewhere and having basic adventures before reaching their reward?

Sadly, yes!

Evening for…

Which means you need to mix it up a bit. Your more emotional side comes out more in the evening, so you may wish to plan for using that time to write your emotional scenes. You know, the ones where you’re literally crying as you write each characters’ heart wrenching discovery/situation. You can write the emotional dialogue, the terrible conflict, the harrowing ordeals in the evening where you can use your own inner turmoil to add life to your characters.

Interestingly, social media is awash with heavy emotion in just about everything. Why? Because everyone is spending time on social media during their emotional times. If we restricted social media to the times human beings were less emotional and more analytical, we’d get a lot more civil and well-thought out responses on these platforms.

Imagine the world if every aspect of our lives took into account our emotional states at certain times? Issues that needed serious analysis of the facts and limited emotional influence would only ever be discussed in the early morning. No more emotional conflicts ever!

But I digress.

Write at different times

And so, now you know. Write your emotional scenes at night and your analytical scenes in the morning. Do all your planning and editing in the morning, and fill in the gaps at night.

You’ll soon be churning out, I mean, creating compelling fiction every month to keep that money rolling in.

To your writing.

[Edit: I’ve recently read blog posts by other authors who say they aim for a minimum of 10,000 words a day. So, your ultimate goal to making a reasonable go at it as a professional author is approximately 280,000 words a month.]

Really Getting Into Your Writing

Have you ever had one of those days when you just wanted to write a story, but had absolutely no experience about how to ‘really’ write it?

Awhile ago, I wanted to write a story about a researcher who was going to use magnets to increase his brain waves to hyperepsilon, but without having first hand experience of that, I needed to find a way to get hold of some kind of magnetic medical system to see which one would work best for the story.

Thankfully, Gumtree regularly features posts by students willing to pay a few dollars to anyone who wants to undergo some of their experiments. For science!

So, I signed myself up for whatever I could get. First, an MRI and MEG scan, followed by a TMS session.

Much to my surprise this enabled me to come up with three different stories.

The MRI

What I learnt from being under this was not only how uncomfortable it was (information easily found online) but WHERE it was uncomfortable. The rigidity of the bed, the inability to stretch for long periods of time. The position of the neck and how that put pressure on the lower back. And the brrzzzz chock chock bang brrzzz chock chock bang as parts whizzed about, recording the responses of my brain.

Each time the equipment moved, I could feel a slight heat through my skin, a mild flicker of my nerves, a burning along the side of my neck tendon, and an aching shudder through my skull. Not to mention the uneasiness of having to squeeze two tiny orange things and push them into my ears to reduce the sound, (still echoingly painful), and the restrictive helmet system that held me in place.

You can see me in the picture above. All that, and I was still freezing in there!

A positive was being able to watch a documentary on the cordyceps fungus, and how it attacked ants. This ended up in the story ExtraForrestrial. Later I was horrified to find this fungus could be bought online in capsules to eat. No thanks!

As I did the MRI experiment three times, I now have that brrzzz chock chock bang permanently engraved in my memory, but I haven’t included this experience in a story yet. Maybe soon!

The MEG

I only had to use the magnetoencephalography machine once, and I can barely remember it. Though, as it was mapping my brain, I’m sure there’s a record of those memories somewhere!

The system made little to no noise, and after the MRI, was quite relaxing. For some of it, I was even in the dark. I felt like I was in a cold plastic egg covered in lots of wires that had to be stuck on and removed. It think the initial coldness of the glue and wires was what surprised me, as well as how long it actually took to get hooked up.

I used this experience to add a bit of realism to the story Cosmic Joke

The TMS

I underwent Transcranial Magentic Stimulation three times too, over a period of several months.

The first stage was to put the skull cap on and glue all the sensors to my head. The gooeyness of the blue-green stuff that was poured into the holes in the skull cap, the scraping of the gel nozzle, as well as the vibration from the top of my skull down to my jaw whenever the scientist clicked the TMS coil, was all a bit disturbing. Imagine having things stuck in your ears, being unable to move, and someone dropping cold dollops of oil into your hair, scratching each dollop with a blunt knife, then hitting you with a tiny hammer!

The first lot of clicks was to locate the exact place in my brain to begin the experiment. To do that, she glued a sensor on the inner part of my thumb, and clicked across my frontal lobe with the TMS coil until my thumb twitched. She knew then that she had found the right spot and could begin the experiment. Sometimes it took awhile to find that exact spot, and the weird part was that I could feel the clicks within my skull. Either that was referred pain, or the vibration resonating within the skull cavity, or it was really stimulating some nerve endings somewhere inside my cerebrum.

Afterwards, she washed my hair, and it took a bit of time to get all the gel out. So, these little things, which aren’t easily found online, were the sorts of things I wanted to include in a story.

From this experience I wrote Still in Beta.

So, if you get stuck on how to write a story, and can’t find anything on Google to help, maybe you just need to get a bit more involved!