Review: “2k to 10k” by Rachel Aaron

Thumbs up for 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron. Writing.

Good advice on writing more words, writing better words, and wasting less time doing it. Bullshit-free. My litmus test for a book on writing is: “Does this make me want to go buy the author’s novels”? And this passes with flying colors.

The point of this exercise [visualizing your outlined scenes before writing] is that when you cruise through your plot visually, you’re looking at your story as a reader instead of a writer. Your writer mind might consider a scene necessary for plot reasons, but if your reader mind is bored, it’ll skip right over that scene to get back to the good stuff. This is a giant red flag. I don’t want my readers to skip over anything I write, and I don’t want to waste my time writing boring crap no matter how nicely it fits into the plot. Ripping a scene out of a finished plot can feel really scary, but this is all part of the “Be excited about everything you write” component of the 2k to 10k writing triangle. It’s much better to stop and think up a new scene now, when rearranging the story is easy, than to try and wrestle with a dull scene further down the road.