Wil Wheaton talks about five simple steps to keep writing. It's been bugging the crap out of me that I haven't progressed on the novel. I have the energy (well, some days), I keep looking at myself in the mirror in the morning and say (among other things, like "WTF is that?!") "Need to work on the novel. It's only 90,000 words. You've written that much on the blog just this year. You need to work on this novel."
And then something comes up; village work, extra design work, lawn mowing, low blood sugar, battling the monster algal blooms I've allowed to cover the bathroom surfaces, alien abduction, things keep getting in the way. And then I look at the blank screen for five minutes after typing a little and my brain gets all twitchy and starts replaying Kurt Colbane ("Here we are, now entertain us!") at full volume. I go off and give my brain something to think about. Or I try and work on something smaller.
"It's just ten short stories," I'll tell myself. "I can do that. You can do that. Just farging do that."
I've tried #2, create deadlines for myself. But I know they're soft. I know what hard deadlines are, and mine aren't and my brain knows the difference. I've tried #3, little rewards for interm milestones. But then I'm enjoying those little gifts and not getting anything done.
I think I'm suffering from a lot of #1Blog less (have you notice just how much blathering I'm doing? No, right here, right now, oh damn, now Van Halen is playing really loud in my head). I should, but I love this. Yeah, I know.
I think I also got hit with #4, Don't show your work (until first draft is done). I've failed at that. And I think (at least in my mind) that the wind went out of the balloons as I published that exert however many months ago. I was really happy with it. I wanted to share. It was fun. And just like Wil, I'm not sure why it would happen, and it really sucks when it does. And then I commit the opposite of #1.
It's a cycle. I've broken cycles before. My past is littered with spokes and handlebars of all the cycles I've gotten away from. I can do this. I need to do this.
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Like Charlie Brown, I tend to work best under pressure. The one play I've written and had published was originally written in college, when on a Friday afternoon I asked the head of the theater department if he'd consider doing a student play and entering it in the American College Theater Festival. He said they'd never done so, but he was open to it. He asked if he could see the script I'd written. I said "sure, but can I have a couple of days to tighten it up?"
He wanted to read it over the weekend, but agreed to an extension until Sunday evening to let me "tighten it up." Of course, what I actually had on paper was a couple of pages, and I knew how I wanted it to end. Yep, plenty of tightening up to do.
Because I had to, I wrote the entire two-act play in one weekend. And did a good enough job that he agreed to do it as long as I understood it needed work. Hell yeah I understood it needed work. But I did it, it was successful, and after two years and some more rewrites Players Press published it.
I've also written articles on consignment this way, though fortunately not too many. Not the easy way to write, but it seems to work for me when nothing else does.
Uh, "consignment" was supposed to be "assignment." Long day.
Vince, oh yeah. I remember school and getting assignments done, sometimes pulling all nighters, but they were all done on time. In past two years, two of the four stories I've written were done for anthologies, which had hard deadlines. Those certainly focused me in on completing the stories (although not in time to have my critique group go through them, have to fix that for next time). This past summer I had a moving deadline, but quick one to do a rewrite for submission. That also focused me in and gave me a goal to shoot for (and it's the submission my brain is worrying over the most, can't help it).
It *is* difficult. And you *can* do this. And you *have* blogged that much.
ps -- ...only difficult in spurts. Sometimes it's smooth sailing and the easiest, most amazing thing in the world.
And the best writing advice I read recently?
"Write. Even when you feel like crap, write. Because what you write when you feel like crap is almost as good as what you write when you don't."
Thanks Camille. I need to get on this. Hopefully I'm almost through much of the Village stuff (but I've had that thought before) and get get back to maintenance. And that's good to know, about feeling like crap, because that's the way I feel right now. I must have caught something somewhere this weekend, and now it's kicking my butt. Thank the gods for Nyquil.
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