A postscript on the day.
Dec. 6th, 2011 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, I had a few moments today when I was looking at how little I had done vs. how much I had on the calendar and felt... not like giving up, exactly, because I never give up. But there's a point past which I look at a thing and no longer feel motivated to give it my best shot. Like, if something is merely challenging, I rise to the challenge. But it reaches a point of overwhelming, and I'm overwhelmed by it. Cursed by tautology!
The 20/10 method helped a lot, because when my start timer went off, I started. It's the same kind of visceral emotional boost that Write Or Die gave me, but it's not tied to a specific program... my problem with WoD was that it crashed too often for my liking and that it did not autosave. My phone makes it easier to 20/10, but other than that it's not tied to any particular program or piece of hardware.
Once I got going I had a moment where I contemplated finishing the OT story I'm writing (one of the long-promised pieces, "The Scowling of the Shire"... AKA, how Two and Hazel spent their summer holiday), but I decided that in this case I should pursue polish over punctuality. What I wrote today was a lot of rapid fire dialogue... "rapid fire" here describing how I wrote it, not necessarily the natural pacing of the dialogue in the story. It needs more description, it needs more emoting/characterization. And while I could just have a 2,000 word story that ends on a pithy line of dialogue, I'm more interested in having something like a resolution.
So I decided to hold it over for a day. This is the sort of thing that I started doing when I introduced the multi-day writing cycle. It's something that I haven't been able to consistently do with the OT stories at all, and haven't done lately with the main chapters. Today's a good day to start. I'm going to earmark this story for finishing in the morning, and get started on the regular chapter for the 8th in the afternoon. Two days to actually write a chapter isn't where I want to be, but it's more than I've been using.
I'm laying finishing this story out as my task for tomorrow morning under the theory that this (having a specific thing... something not difficult but definitely and clearly work) will help me jumpstart my day. It's dang hard tto get up in the morning and start writing a story, but finishing it after having spent so many odd moments throughout the night thinking about what it needs? That's a different story.
Also, tomorrow, I need to work on having a fall back thing already open to ctrl-tab to when I get stuck on what I'm working on. I lost some momentum scrambling on that.
The 20/10 method helped a lot, because when my start timer went off, I started. It's the same kind of visceral emotional boost that Write Or Die gave me, but it's not tied to a specific program... my problem with WoD was that it crashed too often for my liking and that it did not autosave. My phone makes it easier to 20/10, but other than that it's not tied to any particular program or piece of hardware.
Once I got going I had a moment where I contemplated finishing the OT story I'm writing (one of the long-promised pieces, "The Scowling of the Shire"... AKA, how Two and Hazel spent their summer holiday), but I decided that in this case I should pursue polish over punctuality. What I wrote today was a lot of rapid fire dialogue... "rapid fire" here describing how I wrote it, not necessarily the natural pacing of the dialogue in the story. It needs more description, it needs more emoting/characterization. And while I could just have a 2,000 word story that ends on a pithy line of dialogue, I'm more interested in having something like a resolution.
So I decided to hold it over for a day. This is the sort of thing that I started doing when I introduced the multi-day writing cycle. It's something that I haven't been able to consistently do with the OT stories at all, and haven't done lately with the main chapters. Today's a good day to start. I'm going to earmark this story for finishing in the morning, and get started on the regular chapter for the 8th in the afternoon. Two days to actually write a chapter isn't where I want to be, but it's more than I've been using.
I'm laying finishing this story out as my task for tomorrow morning under the theory that this (having a specific thing... something not difficult but definitely and clearly work) will help me jumpstart my day. It's dang hard tto get up in the morning and start writing a story, but finishing it after having spent so many odd moments throughout the night thinking about what it needs? That's a different story.
Also, tomorrow, I need to work on having a fall back thing already open to ctrl-tab to when I get stuck on what I'm working on. I lost some momentum scrambling on that.