...is that they can often conflict with each other and end up creating gridlock as you stare in bewilderment at the mess you have created with your life. I hear you begging for an example. Seriously, I hear you begging. Don't deny it.
In this completely theoretical example, not at all based on the real life of anyone dead, living, real, fictional or otherwise making this non-theoretical, you are a relatively new writer for whom writing daily would have been seen as a chore before, say, November of last year. That is when you set a goal for yourself to write an average of 1000 words a day - keep in mind, this is just a nice round ballpark figure for theoretical purposes.
You have just completed eight weeks averaging a little over 1000 words a day in a private journal, but you are not happy exactly what you are writing. You find yourself creating too much stream of consciousness stuff. This sometimes includes material you would post in one of your online journals and other times stuff that you wouldn't be caught dead with in an online journal. Sometimes that off-limits material is just bad writing - other times its way too current-job obsessed, occasionally sensitive. Further, the effort you are putting into getting your words in is driving you to be awake far too often, late into the night, to get those words pounded out. All of this in an effort to establish a new habit that should make it easier to steer this mass of output in the theoretically not-too-distant future.
Do you see it? Good.
Now. You as hinted above, you are keeping blogs - multiple blogs - as another effort you are trying to move toward the habit of. You have also committed to crafting short stories for submission to your writing group on a regular basis.
For a kicker, you have decided that revision words do not count toward your 1000 words a day goal. The daily words are only original work creation. Ouch. That means you are really signing up for more work than you originally expected. That is going to leave a mark. This one could have gone either way, but you really didn't want to be a pussy about it. Instead, you charged into a new reality where you would be crafting two new novel drafts a year plus short stories, plus journal entries, while still moving two of your past works to a finished state during the course of that year. It takes guts and you should be proud of yourself, if you exist.
Now. You have some revelations in your journal that you are keeping apart from your blogs. Some of this content you want to pull back into your blogs to share with your online friends. When do you carve that time out of the rest of your schedule to transcribe the words that count toward neither a) the creation word quota, nor b) the revision word objective?
I am pondering a not entirely different question right now, not that it was the inspiration for this completely fabricated example. If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them. My current path is just to internalize habit 1, the daily word objective while shifting into a different gear, accomplishing the week's word count objective in five days instead of seven. The two additional days a week would then become dedicated to revision and planning of the coming week's efforts.
I do expect to post in detail, the new plan for work distribution throughout the week. But for the moment, I am afraid I am out of time.
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4 comments:
Not that I have any suggestions that might be helpful, but your entry did get me to thinking about how I schedule my own day and writing. So I wrote about it on my blog today.
The first draft is where you get to not only experiment, but to be dissatisfied. My advice is in the theoretical instance where you write stream-of-consciousness, to keep doing what you're doing with the stream-of-consciousness. I've never been big on requiring a muse or to allow characters to take over a story or other 'I have no control over my writing' issues, but having said that, I'm very respectful of my subconscious. Somewhere in there is a compelling enough story that it wants to come out, otherwise you wouldn't have felt compelled to write it. If you can find the heart of the story, then it becomes easier to control the process. Until then, trying to change the style of output is fraught with peril. It's very difficult to find a story's core when you're wrestling with technique. Gotta let it flow. In that theoretical situation you have to trust that you'll get to what matters eventually. Write to the end, and allow resting the ms and revision to help you find the story and to reformat it into something closer to what you want.
As far as the schedule, five and two sounds like a great idea. The key is that it has to be workable for you. Writing late into the night (and not getting enough sleep) is a very common problem for writers with an intense day job. Hence the strong desire to quit the day job and write full time as soon as possible. In the meantime, I hope you hang in there.
Hiya! I just tagged you for a blog game! The details are at Writer in the Trenches
Come over and play if you have the chance!
I tagged you for the same game. Two annoyances for the price of one!
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