Daily Workflow, Part One

It feels good to be back in the actual stringing-words-together phase of writing. We enjoy the planning and scheming parts as well, but the rhythms of our work sessions during prose composition feel special.

We sit down together and we write. This is typically in the evening, after the day-jobbing and dinner-having. Eventually it’s really late and somebody points out that some of us have to get up in the morning, so we do our wrap-up ritual.

What each of us has written that evening gets read aloud. (By Kent. That’s the rule, apparently.) This serves a couple of valuable purposes. First off, it brings us up to speed on each other’s progress. But also, we can bring up any questions or concerns and chat about them. If there are notes, then fixing those things is usually what we tackle first in the next work session.

Reading your own stuff out loud is a really good way to detect more typos and grammatical irregularities than you will otherwise. If you trip over a sentence, it probably needs to be simplified. Hearing your stuff read out loud helps you spot things, too. It engages different filters.

A writing partner is someone who will (make you) read your stuff out loud.