My brothers and I often say ‘hey, it’s bulking season,’ as we devour ridiculous amounts of food. It’s something of a joke; most of us are actively trying to put weight on. But we aren’t going to get into all of that. Because guess what else is in bulking season? Your novel. Your book. Your whatever-it-is. Whether you’re collecting poetry, writing the next Great American Novel, or chipping away at your memoir, let’s talk about how to beef it up when you’re in the all-important bulking season.

What, exactly, is the bulking season for a book? Depending on what your personal writing style is, bulking season might fall in your first draft stage. Another term I use for this is overwriting. But if you prefer to write light in the early stages and add meat later, then that’s where your bulking season will fall. Wherever it sits in your process, the point of it is to get as much on the page as you possibly can. Write everything. Write constantly. If you want your book to be two hundred pages, bulking season will probably produce two-fifty.

What I call overwriting is a specific strategy to maximize your productivity with the intent of also maximizing your options. When I’m struggling with a chapter and am not quite sure what details I want to include, I overwrite. I bulk up the chapter. I might intentionally repeat the same sentence but present it four or five different ways. The result is that I have forty-five details to choose from, and I can then select the cream of the crop – maybe it’s only ten – and streamline it down to those. Sometimes, you have to write the forty-five to get the ten.

This might sound terrifyingly unproductive or wasteful to some people, and that’s okay. We all have a writing style and process uniquely our own, and what works for one person is anathema to another. Some people might prefer to sit and muse for an hour and come up with the perfect ten details in their head before ever setting it on paper.

I find that overwriting works well for me because not only does it help me find what I need for that particular work, but it also creates a massive database of scenes, sentences, and turns-of-phrase that I can cannibalize for other work. What might not work for Novel A will be perfect for Novel B or C.

Maybe you only want to write one novel and have no desire to save things for future works. Overwriting can still be monumentally useful because practice makes progress. For example, say Sentence Six is the one that will be perfect. But you have to practice/attempt it those five preceding times before you make it to the perfect one.

So, write it out. Try it different ways. Commit to writing more emotion, more detail, more sentences than you normally would. Hammer your point home harder than feels necessary. Lay out all your cards, and you might very well surprise and delight yourself with what comes out when you dig a little deeper.