Line Upon Line- by Nicki Chapelway

Hey guys and welcome to our first Tips for Tales! This week we are joined by Nicki Chapelway. She’s an Indie Author and she has published several books (Some of which being Of Gold and Iron, and Winters Cursed). I’m interested in what she has for us today!

“Hi, I’m Nicki Chapelway. I’m a multi-published indie author of nine projects. I’ve been publishing for about six years now, and I would say that the number one bit of writing advice that has changed how I am able to work on my stories is “write every day”. Now I know that writing is a fluid process, it works differently per person so it’s hard to just give blanket advice that works for everyone. However, I think that the write-every-day tip is definitely something that merits at least a little experimentation to see if it would work for you. Also, I’ll point out that I don’t write every day I will oftentimes take Sunday or even Saturday off. I do however write just about every weekday.

When I first started out writing, it was a struggle to write my first draft. I was only just learning the craft and every few weeks all of my progress would halt as I would hit writer’s block. I wrote only when the muse struck me and sometimes it waited a whole month to strike. It would take a whole year just to write a draft. Then I got involved in a speed write your book in a month challenge and I started writing every day. Through that I realized, the more I wrote, the less writer’s block I got. Writing is a habit and the brain is like a muscle, you have to exercise it or else it will get out of shape. Even just stretching it by writing a hundred words a day can go far not only in keeping your brain active and from—in a sense—atrophying but it also gets your book written faster. If you write only 100 words a day for a hundred days, you will have TEN THOUSAND words by the end. Every little bit adds up. But it doesn’t have to be just a little bit, I find that the more I write, I end up writing more.

To illustrate my point, I was working on a particular project in 2019. I started it on July 1st and finished it by November 9th—it was 150,000 words long. I kept a careful log of how many words I wrote each day (I am not half as organized nowadays), so I’ll share a little bit with you to show how writing every day helps you build momentum as you go. It started off rocky, I only wrote about three days in July and only five in August, it wasn’t until September that I started writing every day. By September 10th I only had 26,082 words written after two and a half months. However after diligently writing every day it only took me 16 days to get another 20k and double my word count. By October 7th I had written 61,493 words. By the end of the month I was at 130,000 words, and I then went on to write the last 20k in the first nine days of November and finished the project. Something I never would have been able to do so quickly if I wasn’t writing every day.
It has taken me years to get into the habit of consistently writing every day, but all of that hard work was well worth it. As I said, the more you do it, the more momentum you build. This year I have managed to write around 600,000 words, I have finished four first drafts and am wrapping up a fifth. I have also managed to publish three works all in the span of only one year thanks to this momentum. It no longer takes me a whole year to write just one first draft. So yeah, I would definitely recommend you trying it out for yourself.”

Thanks Nicki for your article! I hope we will take this to heart and put it into practice. (I know I will!) You can follow Nicki’s blog by going  to  Myths, Magic, and Madness (nickichapelwayauthor.blogspot.com) . Feel free to leave feedback. Did you try out this tip? How did it work for you? I’d love to hear from you! See you soon with our next “Tips for Tales”!