Coming Up Short

How is it that I spend a 110 minutes writing and only spit out around 6-700 words? That’s pretty bad. Granted, a lot of it was spent editing and re-writing. Yes, I decided to completely re-write the last bit of chapter and the entirety of Chapter Three – neither one was working the way I thought it would, so that leaves me back to square one. I’m worried that I’m falling in the old trap of over-thinking the story, the characters and the setting, but – it just didn’t feel right to me, this wasn’t the natural way for it to flow. 

Plus, the way I was ‘editing’ the other chapter was basically to re-write it, one line at a time. Faster just to start from scratch and it makes me think about new ways to approach it. I think I may have an idea where it’s going, but I’m not really sure quite yet. I suspect there will be yet more editing involved, because an idea just hit me for how the chapter could go – something that might be the right way forward. I will have to play with the idea. 

Procrastination reared its head again – I didn’t want to start writing and didn’t until the evening rolled around. But I forced myself. Writing, like anything else, is a discipline. I have to do it, every day, no exceptions – doesn’t matter if I feel uninspired, doesn’t matter if I don’t want to. I have to write if this thing is going to actually get finished. And I’m working hard on getting rid of the focus problem – this will be my main project and I will produce a complete draft, a story with a beginning middle and end. 

I intend for it to be a standalone novel, and that way it will stay – a good deal of the other projects I have in mind are lengthy epics spanning multiple books and they’re not anywhere near done at the moment. We shall see what I work on. Enjoy a shorter than usual entry, I guess.

Thanks for reading.

Confessions

I have a confession to make: I didn’t get any actual writing done yesterday. I instead ended up editing the chapters I’ve already written – the latter half of Chapter Two and…pretty much the entirety of the third chapter. The events didn’t feel at all right – I rambled on and on about how a story should ‘flow’ – well, the way the events were playing out, it was definitely not how the story should work.

I hope to make up missing time today, have an epic session in which I plow through the rest of Chapter Four. I have to finish my editing of Three first, though – it took me longer than I thought to edit, I must have spent a good hour going through those two chapters, changing things here or there, tweaking them slightly. I admit, I have no idea where they’re going so it should be interesting to see. 

Procrastination hit me too, unfortunately another reason why I didn’t get the writing done like I thought I’d be able to – I waited until the late afternoon, and then discovered that plans I had previously thought cancelled were, in fact, un-cancelled, so…yeah. My own fault there. I’ll get through it, though. There will be lots of writing today, I swear.

I’ve also been thinking some about my NaNoWriMo project (yes, already, even though November is months away at this point.). I think I have something I’m going to try – it’s on my backlog for years now, kind of a superhero modern Earth type thing. I think that this year I should be able to actually complete NaNoWriMo this year, especially since once we get to that point I’ll have had months and months of writing every day. Pumping out the 1667 words a day will be no big deal – I’m getting to the point where I’m capable of doing that now in a single ‘main’ session. 

We will just see when we get there, I suppose. What else can I say here? I had something in mind…oh, I remember! I’ve been thinking about my writing process. I basically write the chapters one at a time, go back and re-read and make a few edits (occasionally rewrites, as I’m doing now. I’m pretty much re-writing the current batch of chapters one line at a time). But I am thinking that, once the draft is done, I should print off an entire copy of the draft, read through it and mark it up for a second round of revisions. I think I probably would edit better if I was working from a hard copy. But the problems are that’s kind of expensive and time consuming. And my desk is really small and cramped, which makes it difficult to do things other than sit on the computer and type and what-not. 

Lots of writing today, lots of editing – there’s still about four pages left for me to go through on the story. I’m pretty much out of things to say regarding how the writing is going, so I guess I’ll close this out with a short description.

The dim sky slowly lit up in the east, the sun barely above the horizon, looking down upon the ancient temple, a large square structure mounted on the top of a hill. Steep stairs, guarded on either side, by faceless angel statues ran up to the entrance – two enormous, heavy doors. Braziers stood unlit on either side, and the whole place had an aura of neglect to it – weeds sprouted from cracks in the stone. In some places, carvings were missing and broken. The doors were sealed shut, and the whole place looked sad as it crumbled slowly back into oblivion.

Articulating a Philosophy

Yesterday’s writing session went okay, I guess. I think I’m going to have to back up and probably make some changes to what I did yesterday, because it doesn’t feel quite right, it’s not flowing as well as it should I have. I am thinking that I may shoot for a full ninety minutes today instead of the required sixty and possibly polish off the third chapter. 

In any case, I find rambling about the specifics of my projects to be dull, and that single paragraph up above is really all I have to say about it. I’ve also noticed that, now that the warm-ups have become a blog, it’s made me choose my words a little more carefully and it’s a little harder to ramble on and on. 

I need to set that aside, just be honest – it’s mostly just me musing to myself over writing, the problems I’m facing and other things. I touched on the two large ones yesterday, lack of focus and procrastination. There was a third one that I believe I found a solution to, that I’m going to ramble on about now. 

For a very long time, I had, shall we say, issues with writing – even with the time limit, the words wouldn’t come, the plot stayed at a standstill, and my word count suffered. Then it hit me all of a sudden: I was over-thinking it. I was spending my time trying to plan it out before writing a word of the actual manuscript, I was treating it like a machine. Writing is not a machine, it’s an art form. 

The story has to flow naturally – some of my biggest projects (and the ones I’m most proud of) emerged because of spontaneous writing. There were no specific plans I had in mind, no attempts to force the plot to do what I wanted, it just happened and it came simply and naturally. Every story, I think, has a rhythm to it, a certain beat that the author needs to find if the writing is to proceed. Basically, writing is an art-form, not a science. It’s organic, a living thing, not a machine. 

That…probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it made sense in my head. I’m still trying to find the best way to articulate my philosophy and how it’s shaping the story that I’m writing. Just let the story, let the words come. If you have no idea what they might be, just start throwing them on the page and seeing what sticks, until you find the right words, the right rhythm, the beat.

My first (recent) attempt at it didn’t end particularly well, as the characters were largely incredibly silly and the story quickly devolved to a pile of mush (not literally), which leads me to believe that there’s a piece of the puzzle missing here – the author needs to take an active role in shaping the story, while still trying to let it flow naturally, still trying to let it emerge organically. Like shaping a bush, or a landscape, trying to find the best fit. 

I’ve recently started (or, I guess, returned since I’ve done this before) re-reading the previous chapters and editing them, reminding myself of what’s happening in the story and making little changes here and there to the main manuscript. This worked fairly well in the past and it seems to be working here, I just hope it leads to an actual finished draft of a story. 

Then, once the draft is done, it’s time for more editing! There’s always lots of touch-ups, changes, revisions, re-writes that need to be made. In any case, that’s enough rambling for one day. Thanks for reading.

Introduction

Well, apparently I’m now writing a blog and have decided to start using these warm-ups as aforementioned blog. Why? Well, because they were starting to sound like a blog and were basically rants in which I rambled for ten minutes at a time about my writing and how my currents projects were going (quite well.). I was still debating it in my head as early as yesterday, and the agonizing decision came down to…’Sure, why not?’.

So – let’s give an introduction to potential readers. Not that I imagine there will be very many people interesting in the ravings of an Oklahoman who keeps going on and on about my writing. A couple of months ago, I decided to improve my writing skills by forcing myself to write every day. The initial goal was five minutes for a warm-up, where I would write whatever I wanted to, as an effort to craft new ideas and concepts for upcoming stories I would write and then a minimum twenty minutes a day on a ‘main’ project (typically a novel I’ve been working on. Some of these projects I’ve had in mind since I was twelve or thirteen) and still am interested in doing something with them. 

My biggest problem was – is – lack of focus whenever it came to writing. I couldn’t work on a project for longer than a minute or so before getting on the Internet. So I added free timer software to my computer, and forced myself to write, counting it down. So I wouldn’t be tempted to stop writing and look at how much time was left, I added icons that displayed the time on the desktop – now, I could see how much I had to go without actually stopping writing. 

And the experiment worked. Since I started doing this (beginning the 23^rd of April), I’ve gradually increased the time on the timers – from five to ten minutes for the warm-up – or blog post now, I guess, to thirty minutes on the main project. I’m forcing myself to put in a full hour minimum on the main project as of now – two thirty minute blocks of time. They can be either back to back or at two different points during the day. But they have to be done.

At some time in May, I decided to start keeping track of my daily word count and time I spent writing – sort of a way to keep myself accountable. That’s proven effective to. Once I’ve passed a full year of writing, I plan on making a graph to see how much progress I’ve made on terms of stamina. And so far, it’s worked out quite well. The only day I’ve missed since I started this little experiment is the day of the tornadoes.

Focus is one of my two biggest worries at the moment. Like I said earlier, I had, shall we say, issues with focusing on writing at all. Now I find myself bouncing back and forth between different projects like a pinball – I’ll work on one for a day or so, then start thinking of another and an interesting idea I can use for that, so I switch gears to that project – rinse and repeat. I –may have that beat, though. I have a project I’m working on that I’m quite happy with. Procrastination is my other worry – I tend to put off writing till the evenings (with the exception of these blogging warm-ups.), but I do eventually get to it.

I need to pick a time and make a habit out of it – I handle these warm-ups usually shortly after I roll out of bed, and that’s rapidly becoming a habit. But still, I’m not resting on my laurels just yet. There’s still a ways to go. My current goal is actually finish a manuscript, so hopefully I’ll get something done. 

A final note: these blog entries should be daily, since I’m basically copy-pasting my warm-up writings from Word (which, as I said, had pretty much turned into a blog instead of snatches of story, description). Basically, a lot of these entries will be me rambling about writing and now and again, I’m going to have actual stories that I wrote for the warm-ups especially if I don’t have anything to say about how the writing is going.

That is all. Thanks for reading.