On November 13, 2007 I ran out of plot for the NaNoWriMo novel I was writing. I had no idea what to write next. That’s not uncommon for NaNo novelists, but I hadda do something to jiggle myself loose. In NaNoWriMo, word count is everything, and I couldn’t afford to fall behind.

So I tried something I hadn’t tried before: I interviewed my characters.

Well, that turned out to be more interesting than I’d anticipated. And it boosted my word count to boot. And on top of that, it offered some plot ideas.

I didn’t use any pre-planned questionnaire. There are zillions of character questionnaires on the web, and none of them ever seemed to get at the heart of the character.

Instead, I did what I do in many real-life interviews: Follow the energy. The idea is to:

1. Ask a question that invites the character to tell me something new
2. Listen for emotional intensity in the answer. Sometimes the emotion is subtle, and other times it’s big and obvious.
3. Ask my next question based on that emotion.

Rather than describing this process in detail, I’ll let you read the interviews as I conducted them, unedited. I offer these interviews not necessarily as exemplary, but merely as examples. The thing to notice is how I followed the characters’ energy.

Some background: The novel involves a time loop. Every 29 hours, the characters (and everyone else in the story world) loop back in time. The story follows two main plots.

In the first plot, Dan Roberge murders his wife Faith and her lover Zorem. Then time loops and he murders them again. And again. Police detectives Ray Andollo and Patty Yonce investigate.

The interviews:

• Dan Roberge
• Faith Roberge
• Zorem Bigotte
• Detective Ray Andollo
• Detective Patty Yonce

In the second plot, Amy Anderson saves her son from drowning in a pond on the family farm. Then time loops and her son drowns. Then time loops again. After the first incident (before the first time loop), Amy’s husband Frank becomes engraged when he discovers that Amy had been drinking while their sons played at the pond.

The interviews:

• Amy Anderson. This was my favorite interview, because it so significantly affected my understanding of the character.
• Frank Anderson

This week I wrote more words than I expected for each topic. I also wrote less coherently. During the first two weeks I usually had some idea of what I wanted to say about a topic. This week my writing was more of a brain dump. It will be interesting to see what it’s like to edit this week’s writing.

I drew mind maps for two big topics: how relationships affect resistance, and how context or environmental factors affect resistance. The mind maps give me plenty to write about—probably several days worth of writing for each topic.

I didn’t expect to write last night. I expected to rest for a class I’m teaching with Elisabeth Hendrickson. But at 10pm I got the itch to write. I ended up writing 2200 words in an hour and a half, and got too little sleep. I’m taking tonight off to get some well-earned rest.

Here are some thoughts from my second week of DaNoFiWriMo, my project to draft a 50,000 word non-fiction book in a month.

New word processor. I’ve switched to a new word processor called Rough Draft, which my writer friend Jennifer recommended. The thing I like most about Rough Draft is its simplicity. For what I’m doing, I don’t need styles, tables, diagrams, or change tracking. I may want those features later as I edit my rough draft into a smoother draft. For now, I need to type words, emphasize words, highlight words (to mark them as notes to myself), and count words. Rough Draft does all of that simply and cleanly, with few bells and whistles.

Rough Draft does have one distinguishing feature (either a whistle or a bell, I’m not sure which) that I’ve quickly come to rely on. For each file that you open, Rough Draft attaches a notepad, a simple text file in which you can type notes. Rough Draft displays the notepad as a narrow panel to the right of the main editing window. I’m finding this very handy, because it supports the spiral method that is central to the way I write. As I write about a topic, I think of other ideas that I want to write about, or questions that I want to answer, before I close the topic. I simply click on the notepad, jot a note, and go back to what I was writing. As I finish writing a thought, I check the notepad, grab an idea to write next, write it, and delete the note from the notepad. When the notepad is empty, I’m done writing that section. The notepad works as a high-priority list of micro-ideas. Very, very nice.

Version control and backups. Something I forgot to mention last week, probably because I was focusing on what was new in my writing process, is that I use a version control system to protect my files. I’m partial to the Tortoise SVN system, because it integrates nicely with the Windows file system. When I finish a writing session, I right click in my writing folder and commit my new material to a repository for safekeeping. Though Tortoise SVN takes a little bit of technical savvy, I highly recommend it for writers.

For greater protection I use EMC’s Retrospect, which automatically backs up my files to a separate hard drive every day at 5am.

Depleting the high energy queue. Several times this week I depleted high energy queue. It’s pretty slim right now. Scary. But so far I’ve been able to find something to write about every day.

Bigger topics. I never know how many words I’m going to write about each topic. Most end up in the 300–800 word range, similar to my blog posts. This week I found a few topics about which I had more to say. A few topics went to several thousand words each. I love when that happens.

One of those topics was definitions of resistance. Another was, more or less, why we don’t do the things we “know” we ought to do. Lots of people have asked me about that over the years, and when I finally started writing about it, I got four or five thousand words from the topic. And I’m not done yet. The scare quotes around “know” are a clue to my ideas on the topic.

Obsessed with word count. I long ago developed the habit of typing CTRL-S into whatever editor or word processor I’m using. I want to make sure my words are saved onto my hard drive. Every time I pause in my writing, I type CTRL-S without thinking about it. (Like just then.) I’ve now developed another habit for this book: Typing CTRL-W to display my word count. I’m obsessed with my word count.

When my word count for the day reaches about 1100, my energy really picks up. It feels as if I’m in the home stretch, and I can see the finish line just ahead. Very motivating. And most of the time my energy carries me a few hundred words past my daily goal. Which brings me to another topic…

Building a buffer. As I exceed my word goal each day, I start to build a buffer of “excess” words, so that if I miss a daily goal I’m still on target for the month. My buffer at the moment is about 2600 words, about a day and two thirds worth of writing. I’m hoping to increase the buffer to 3 days, because I’ll be teaching a class with Elisabeth Hendrickson next week and may not write much during those three days. (On the other hand, the class will probably give me a lot of fodder for the book, so I may write more instead of less.)

The Fieldstone Method. As I was writing about energy last week it didn’t occur to me (duh!) that I am using Jerry Weinberg’s Fieldstone Method to write this book. The central element of the Fieldstone Method is energy. As Jerry says in Weinberg on Writing, “That’s the secret of the Fieldstone Method: Always be guided by emotional responses or, as Fieldstone writers say, by the energy.” I’ve attended three of Jerry’s writing workshops, and each time come away with new ideas and new enthusiasm for my writing. The Fieldstone Method is all about energy, and that’s how I’ve been focusing my work each day.

Johanna Rothman blogged about her current writing project. She’s writing a chapter at a time, and as she finishes drafting each chapter she sends it to her editor for review. It occurred to me that I’m not writing chapters yet. I don’t know the structure of my book. Instead, I’m writing “fieldstones.” Each fieldstone is single idea for which I have some energy. Later I’ll use some of organizing ideas from Jerry’s Fieldstone Method to create (or find) a structure for the book, and revise the fieldstones to work within that structure. But for now my focus is: One fieldstone at a time.

Waiting for the muse. Nearly every day I use an old, familiar pattern of mine: I wait for the muse to inspire me before I sit down to write. And nearly every day I find that my muse doesn’t work that way. Instead, as Madeline L’Engle says, “Inspiration usually comes during the work, rather than before it.”

Multiple projects. I’m planning to write a novel next month as part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. This week I’ve started to flesh out the characters and plot for the novel. That gives me something to do when I want to write but don’t have the energy for the resistance book. I find that after a half-hour or so of work on the novel I am fully into a writing mood and can use some of that energy for the resistance book.

Also, I’m finishing up the design for a workshop on power, which I’ll be presenting at the AYE Conference in a few weeks. It’s just dawned on me that if I’m stuck on the resistance book I can write a few fieldstones about power (maybe for another book for later). As with plotting the novel, writing about power will put me into a writing mood, which I can then redirect toward the resistance book. And of course power and resistance are closely related, so writing about power will trigger new ideas about resistance.

I’m learning about my writing process, and improving it, as I progress on DaNoFiWriMo, my project to draft a 50,000 word non-fiction book in a month.

The most surprising thing I’m learning is that my only real writing challenge is managing my energy. As I decide what to write next, if I pick an idea that I have a lot of energy for, I can quickly write 500 or 1000 words. If I pick a low energy idea, I slowly write 80 words, then discover that the towels in the linen closet desperately need to be rearranged. Unfortunately, rearranging the towels doesn’t add to my word count, so I’ve been working on ways to keep my energy up.

Two factors seem to drive my energy: Keeping a short list of high energy topics, and receiving support from my friends.

Since 1993 I’ve been keeping notes about any topics that interest me. I’ve jotted notes on index cards, note pads, scraps of paper, and paper tablecloths from restaurants. Nowadays I use a small Moleskine notebook that I carry everywhere I go. I highlight the books I read. In the car I take notes and even “highlight” audiobooks using an Olympus DM-10 digital recorder. And I have two dozen hour-long microcassettes full of notes that I recorded before I bought the DM-10. I’ve transcribed most of those recorded notes into text files on my computer.

Naturally, these notes have been invaluable as I draft my book. When I’m stuck on a topic, I open X1, type a few keywords, and scan the notes I’ve made about the topic. It’s likely that I’ve already thought about it (repeatedly), and made notes of my thoughts.

To track my ideas for the book, I’m using EverNote, a wonderful, simple program for writing, storing, categorizing, and searching notes. As I think of ideas, and as I gather notes from my files, I copy each into EverNote and categorize it according to the topics that the note is about.

I also tag each note with a status, such as To Do or Drafted. For the first few days of DaNoFiWriMo, whenever I finished writing about a topic I would scan my To Do notes for another. As my EverNote file grew—it now has 194 distinct ideas to write about—I had a harder time choosing the next topic. I found myself reading and re-reading topics that I didn’t have the energy for right now.

That gave me an idea. I added a new tag called High Energy. Whenever I make a note that I have High Energy for, I tag it. Then when I’m looking for the next topic to write, I look first at the High Energy topics. One of them usually grabs my attention, and I dive in and write about it.

Sometimes as I’m adding a note to a particular topic, the new note combines with existing ones so that the topic reaches critical mass and I suddenly have more energy for it. When that happens, I tag some of that topic’s old notes as High Energy.

One of the keys to energy seems to be keeping my High Energy list short. The list now has 18 items, which is a little larger than I can scan quickly. I may have to drop some items and keep the list to a dozen items or so.

My energy for each topic comes and goes. Just because I marked a topic as High Energy yesterday, or this morning, or twenty minutes ago, that doesn’t mean I’ll have energy for it now. Sometimes I scan through my High Energy topics and don’t feel like writing about any of them. Now what do I write about?

I created a “Jiggler File” to help with that The Jiggler File is a file of ideas for remembering or creating ideas. Whenever my I can’t find anything I want to write about in my EverNote file, I open up my Jiggler File and give myself a jiggle.

Here’s my current Jiggler File:

• 60000 words about resistance. (This is a file I started in 1997 with a goal to write 60,000 words about resistance. I wrote about 15,000 words before fizzling out.)
• Quick takes on resistance. (A list of about 70 principles I’ve learned or invented for responding to resistance.)
• Recorded notes. (Notes I’ve taken on every topic under the sun, and on every writing medium under the sun, since 1993.)
• Highlighted passages. (Passages that I highlighted as I read books.)
• Flip book. (My “flip book” is a spiral-bound book of index cards, and on each card I’ve described a model of some aspect of being human and relating to other people. If I’m stuck for ideas on a given topic—resistance, for example—I can open my flip book to any page, and ask “How does this relate to resistance?” This always gives me fresh ideas.)
• Mind map. (Fire up MindManager and spew a mind map of whatever connections pop into my head.)
• Reasons to; reasons not to; examples of resistance. (A list of examples of resistance, and lists of reasons people have given for doing or not doing something that someone else has requested. I’ve collected hundreds of each during my resistance presentations and workshops over the past 10 years.)
• Presentations. (PowerPoint slides from my presentations about resistance.)
• Make up a story. (If I have a principle but can’t remember the story the led to it, make up a story. This will get me writing, and I can find a real story later.)

So far I haven’t used the last three jigglers. And I haven’t exhausted the ideas from the other jigglers. I’m in no danger of running out of things to write about.

One condition I’ve placed on DaNoFiWriMo is not to use ideas I’ve already written about. In addition to writing directly about “Resistance as a Resource“, I’ve also written popular articles about the closely related topics of communication and change. And I’ve written dozens of blog articles about resistance, communicating, relating, power, and related topics. My choice not to use any of what I’ve written in those articles has been marvelously motivating. It means that when I’m done writing 50,000 words this month, I also have tens of thousands of words of additional material that I can add to the book.

In addition to tagging my notes with topics and status, I also tag it with an indication of… I don’t know what to call this… some sort of rhetorical category. What kind of idea is this? Some ideas are stories. Others are principles. Some are models. Others are definitions, quotations, or procedures.

Somewhere around day 4 I noticed something horrifying. Though the large majority of my notes are principles (110 of my 194 notes), I have very little energy for writing about a principle unless I have a story to go with it. When I remember a story about some aspect of resistance, the words flow easily. And once I’ve written the story, I can describe the principle easily and clearly. But when I start with a principle and try to write about it, I suddenly feel constricted.

The notes I’ve taken over the years are largely notes about principles. When something interesting happens, I tend to summarize it into a principle, and then forget the details of the story. I’ve noticed this when I do classes. People ask me to give examples of the ideas I’m talking about, and often I can’t remember an example. I can see that I’m going to have to change the way I take notes. In addition to writing down the lessons I’m learning from some experience, in the future I will want to write the story of the experience.

Another big lesson (though not a new one for me) is that the support of my friends means a great deal to me. My first sign of support was from a very bright friend who, 12 minutes after I announced DaNoFiWriMo, wrote to tell me that he too would write a book in October, a book he’d been thinking of writing for a long time. He sends me (and other writer friends) daily progress reports, and seeing his progress always gives me a boost of energy. Thank you, as-yet-unnamed author friend!

Second, several people responded to my request for questions about resistance, and several others have talked to me in private about some of their puzzles about resistance. I always have more energy to write when I know that real people care about what Im writing about. Thank you, Richard, Doris, and Elisabeth!

Third, when I complained to a fiction-writing friend that I don’t remember the stories that led to some of the ideas I’m writing about, she said, “Why not make up a story?” Aha! That would get me writing, and I could find a “true” story later. Thank you, Melinda!

Fourth, a number of colleagues I admire, and who have recently published books of their own, wrote to cheer me on. Thank you, Johanna and Dwayne!

And last but not least: That fracking public commitment I made keeps me going when I want to bail out after writing 900 words each day. Thank you, younger Dale!

Perhaps the biggest lesson of DaNoFiWriMo is that I’m learning how to manage my energy, and that in itself is energizing me.

If you want to see what my Spiral Method sessions look like, below is the raw, unedited zeroth draft for my article “Strategies for Stability.” The numbers match the answers to the corresponding questions (e.g. A1 is the answer to Q1). The starred items (*) are ideas that popped into my head, not directly related to any question.

Nugget: People change in order to remain the same. That is, we will change something less important in order to maintain something that is more important.

Q1. How does changing help stay the same?

Q2. Can you give a few examples?

Q3. How can I keep something stable?

Q4. Is this the only reason to change?

Q5. Is this the only way to stay the same?

A1. To keep something the same, we change less important things that either isolate the important thing from change or absorb the change.

A horse’s gait changes when the pressure on its bones reaches one third of the pressure it can handle. The gait change reduces the pressure.

Q6. What about as the horse slows down? Why change gait then?

Q7. Are isolating and absorbing the only reasons for change?

Q8. Are they the only strategies for stability?

* Stability is a problem only when some force acts to cause a change. We can maintain things indefinitely if no force is acting on them.

Q9. How can I use this principle to reduce resistance?

A2. Examples: Drop three low-priority projects in order to sustain progress on high-priority projects.

Rewrite software to take advantage of new technology in order to maintain responsiveness and growth.

Temporarily stop looking for a job, and instead upgrade skills, in order to maintain marketability.

Lower prices in order to maintain market share.

A8: Another way to maintain stability: Adapt to changes in the environment, so that the environment supports the new configuration — or at least doesn’t threaten it.

Three ways to keep something stable:

• Isolate
• Absorb
• Adapt

* Gain or maintain something we value even more.

A4. I believe that the only reason we change is to maintain something more important.

Q10. What about when I change jobs in order to get a raise? That isn’t about maintaining anything.

A5. The only way to maintain something in the face of a threatening force is to change something less important — something that will isolate the more important thing from teh change, absorb the force and dissipate it, or adapt to the change in the environment.

A8. As far as I can tell, these are the only three ways:

Absorb: Convert the force into less harmful forms or more useful forms.

Apply some energy to revert the environment. This takes energy that you could have used for something else. I see that as a form of adaptation.

Absorb (from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary): Include or take (a thing) in so that it no longer has separate existence; incorporate. Gain energy from and reduce the intensity of.

Adapt (from SOED): Fit, adjust. Alter or modify to fit a new use, new conditions.

Isolate (from SOED): Place or set apart or alone; separate from or unconnected with other things.

I’ve written four articles using The Spiral Method, and I’ve been delightfully surprised every time.

I first used The Spiral Method in January, to write the zeroth draft that would become “Strategies for Stability.” I spiraled for a few minutes, and was amazed at quickly The Spiral Method helps me to move my ideas out of my head and onto paper. (Yes, I write my zeroth drafts on paper.) I was also surprised to learn how much material I have floating around in my head behind each of the nuggets I want to write about.

I spent several hours revising. When I was done, I got my next surprise: The nugget that I originally wanted to write about — “People change in order to remain the same.” — was nowhere to be found in the finished article. I’d had that thought in my nugget file for years. Yet while I was spiraling I stumbled onto a question that I wasn’t able to answer, and now I’m no longer sure I believe that initial claim. Somehow, in spiraling and revising, I took the article somewhere I hadn’t foreseen when I started. I was tickled by that.

I next used The Spiral Method for “Tests for Listening.” Before I sat down to write I knew the four “listening tests” that I wanted to write about. I guessed that I’d write about a hundred words about each, plus an introduction and conclusion — maybe 500 words for the whole article. I spiraled on each listening test, revised the zeroth draft into a publishable article, and — surprise! — 1000 words! Who knew I had that much to say? I checked it twice to make sure I hadn’t inserted lots of fluff. Nope.

I worried that 1000 words is a little long for a blog entry. But that’s what it came to, so that’s what I published. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t imagine how to write a 1000 word article. Now I may have a hard time keeping my articles short! I guess that’s progress.

When I sat down last week for my third Spiral Writing session, I thought I knew what I wanted to write about: Needs are more important than wants. I’ve had that idea in my nugget file for years, and finally wanted to write about it. But what I wrote at the top of the page was, “Needs come from wants.” Similar, but not the same. This zeroth draft eventually led to “Testing Needs and Wants.” When the article was done, I noticed once again that not only was the original nugget missing, I was no longer sure I believed it. The Spiral Method, it seems, is a great way to destroy the ideas I’ve loved for years!

As I was revising “Testing Needs and Wants,” I noticed that the article included lots of background material about the structure of values. Too much. It distracted from the distinctions I really wanted to highlight between needs and wants. So I sliced the background stuff into an article on its own, “The Structure of Values.” What a lovely side-effect of writing the needs and wants article! I’d known for months that I would eventually write an article about the structure of values, and here it was.

So this one Spiral Method writing session led to two full articles, each bordering on “too long for blogland” — 2000 words in total. I’m a little nervous about spiraling again. I’m having visions of accidentally unleashing The Blog that Ate Manhattan. (But I’m safe here in Sacramento. I think.)

That’s what I’ve learned so far. The Spiral Method helps me to put my ideas onto paper more quickly and with greater ease than I thought possible. It encourages me to question my ideas and create new ones that I like even better. And it gives me confidence that I have plenty to say.

One night in late December, as I was falling asleep, I had a thought about how to flesh out ideas for articles. I sat up, grabbed a pen and an index card from the stack I keep next to the bed, and wrote:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Then write the implications of the nugget.
3. Then support the nugget.

I was excited about this idea, because though I am quite good at inventing nuggets — the central claims that make me want to write articles in the first place — I struggle with the rest of the writing process, the process of growing a nugget into an article worth writing. I keep forgetting the simple principles that every other author surely knows: Say why this claim is worth reading, and justify the claim. Writing those two simple principles gave me a way to remember, and a way to build articles from nuggets.

The next night, as I was falling asleep, I refined the previous night’s thought:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Write any questions I want to ask about what I have written so far.
3. Answer one question. Return to step 2.

This new version generalizes on the first. The earlier version says to ask and answer two questions: So what? and What makes you so sure? The new version extends that to any question, giving me even more ways to build the article. I liked this new version even better.

On the third night, as I was falling asleep, I refined again, resulting in a process that I call The Spiral Method for Writing Zeroth Drafts:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Write any questions I want to ask about what I have written so far.
3. Select the question that I have the most energy for answering, and answer it. Return to step 2.
4. Stop when I’ve answered all of the questions, or when I have little energy to answer any of the unanswered questions.

I liked this version better still, especially the focus on energy as the key criterion for what to write and when to stop. Focusing on energy ensures that each bit I write not only supports the central idea, but also adds some zing.

So far, I’ve used the Spiral Method three times. Each time, I created enough material for a full article (or two!) in about 30 minutes. Next came hours of editing to shape each zeroth draft into publishable form. The result: four articles and lots of surprises.

Several days after I created the Spiral Method I realized that I’d been inspired by Mark Forster’s process for growing an article, which I’d learned about through Keith Ray’s blog entry of November 30. To grow an article, Mark writes a single sentence, then revises it until the article is done.

As you can see, both Mark’s approach and mine start with a core idea and build outward. The Spiral Method has a little more structure than Marks approach, and I find that I need that additional bit of structure. Alternating between questions and answers, using my energy as a guide, keeps my ideas flowing, while providing lots of opportunity for discovery and surprise.

Though I developed the Spiral Method for myself, I’d be delighted to find that it works for you, too. I’d be even more delighted to learn how you’re using it.