Review: 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 23, 2014
I spent the end of last year and the beginning of this year out of work.  I was laid off in September 2013 and started my new job in March 2014.  Don’t feel bad, I got a SWEET severance package plus my novel royalties.  And I got a ton of writing done.  I wrote one full novel and nearly half a dozen 20,000 word novellas.  Once I started working again, though, that cut my word count per day down by a LOT.  But not all of that reduction was due to work.  After all, I was still home alone all day, just like before.  My job doesn’t start until after the kids get out of school, so the mornings and afternoons are still mine.  But, still, I just wasn’t producing like I had been before I started working again.So when I saw this book on Amazon, and saw that it was only $0.99, I thought why not.  I don’t need to learn how to write 10,000 words a day--honestly, I think that seems a little excessive and surely there’s got to be a drop in quality at that kind out output.  But I’d love to learn how to “write faster, writer better, and write more of what [I] love.”  So I purchased it.Unfortunately, the bulk of the book reads pretty much like I figured it would and the gist of Rachel Aaron’s message can be boiled down to one word: Plan.That’s all it takes, she insists.  If you plan out what you’re going to write before you write it, then when you DO write it, that writing will go much quicker.To an extent, I agree with that.  My last novel went much quicker than any I’d written previously, because I had taken a little time beforehand and developed my characters, developed their motivations, their backgrounds, their connections to one another, and I knew huge huge chunks of the plot before I started writing.  But even having done all of that preliminary work, which I’d never done before, I still found myself going weeks at a time without touching the novel (side note: I did that planning and wrote that novel months ago, before I’d ever heard of Rachel Aaron or her book, so my pre-planning stage had nothing to do with learning anything from this book).So I’m not sure just how workable Aaron’s method is in conjunction with MY method, but I know that it’s not all about planning.  Sure, planning HELPS, but there’s more to writing a novel that just mapping it out before you get started.  Sometimes it’s a question of motivation, momentum, desire.  You can have a detailed outline and know every single day what you’re going to write, but sometimes, admit it, you just don’t feel like writing.But I guess this book isn’t--and shouldn’t be--designed around problems like that.  For what it’s worth, there’s nothing WRONG with this book, but I don’t think Aaron’s tip is any huge revelation, and nothing you couldn’t have figured out for yourself.  I went into it thinking maybe there was some other, interesting method I hadn’t tried already, and I was disappointed to learn that, no, it’s just the same old stuff any other “how to write faster” book is going to tell you.On the bright side, there is a side effect to most writing books that keeps me reading them, and it worked with this one, too.  So while I didn’t glean any new or useful information from 2,000 TO 10,000, it did motivate me and make me want to stop what I was doing--reading the book on break at work--and WRITE.  With that, I was able to finish the first draft of a short story I’d been procrastinating on for several weeks.I still haven’t figured out how to return to the massive word counts of my former unemployed writing days, but at least I did find some value in Aaron’s book.  And as long as the price stays at $0.99, I’d say it’s probably worth the buck to give it a read.