Tag Archives: making time to write

Climbing Wagons

11 Thursday Aug 2011

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A quick note, because I’ve been guilty about the somewhat disappointing mid-year report and don’t want you to think that I just sit around and whine (I know no one who knows me thinks that, but I get paranoid). Since writing that post, I have:

  1. Submitted 3 stories to 13 places (hooray for simultaneous submissions!)
  2. Written a first draft of a story
  3. Resumed editing a story I’ve been sitting on, meaning to rewrite
  4. Published the guest post at the Canary Review

This week, I started getting up at 7:10 instead of 7:25, and am using the extra 15 minutes to write a little before I go to work. It’s helping! I can get about 300-350 words out in my bleary state, which means I only need 150-200 or so when I get home to meet my 500/day goal. Admittedly, I’ve only been getting up early for four days as I write this, but I plan to make it a new habit.

While seeing how far I’d fallen short of my goals was disheartening, writing it out and holding myself accountable does seem to give me a kick toward better progress. I told Andrew that sometimes it’s not even as much a matter of getting back on the wagon as it is finding out where the damn thing went. I feel good about this last month, though. Wagons ho!

Electric Writing Days, or, How I Almost Missed the Train

04 Friday Mar 2011

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Much of the time, writing comes for me in fits and starts. I spend a lot of time treating myself like an old car, thumping myself around, muttering “come onnn,” and making vague promises and threats. Once in a long, long while, though, something magical clicks into place, and I get to spend a little while being the kind of synapse-firing, electric writer that I want to be. Yesterday was one of those days.

I wrote a story in a day, people. I wrote an entire story, beginning to middle to end, in a day. It came in at 3,174 words. Most days, I’m pleased if I hit 500 words, thrilled if I get past 800. During NaNoWriMo, my go-to insane writer’s challenge, reaching 2000 makes me feel like an overachiever, since you only need to write 1,667 to stay on track (I know. “Only.”). This is half again over the kind of overreaching goal I set for myself once a year. Forgive me for bragging, but I am feeling pretty boss right now.

And it was easy! For one glorious day, every time I sat down and opened the laptop, the next sentence came forth smoothly, and the next, and I already knew which scene needed to come after that. I nearly missed my stop on the Metro because I was so engrossed in what I was doing. It’s a good thing I happened to look up to think of the right word and saw “Metro Center” on the board, or chances are I would have been halfway to Vienna by the time I realized I’d been riding too long. It’s a good thing my stop on the way home is the end of the line, too, because it happened again. I only noticed I was there when I realized I was the only person sitting in my car of the train. All in all, between Metro rides, my lunch break, and two power sessions back home, the actual, physical writing of the story took about three and a half hours.

This is not, of course, the same as saying that the story took three and a half hours to write. I’ve been mulling over the world of the story for weeks now, ever since my professor mentioned there’s this crazy experimental poet who wants to use DNA strands as a medium for writing poetry and I thought, how cool would it be if human DNA did have poetry encoded into it? What would that mean for science, and literature, and religion? Who would read it? What would happen if someone didn’t have it? I took a couple stops and starts because there were so many different ways to go with it and I couldn’t figure out whose story I wanted to tell. So two days ago I got frustrated and spent my lunch hour putting together my notes of how this world worked, and who my characters were, and what they wanted and why. I don’t usually take that kind of prep time before writing, and I’m still not sure if I’ll make a regular practice of it, just because one of the things I’m learning is how different stories can be from each other. Practices that feed one story can suck the life out of another, but for this story, at least, making an outline worked in spades.

Next week is revising time, so chances are I’ll be grumbling again, but for now I’m still on the high. These are the moments to hold onto all the other times when nothing is working, and I hope next time I find myself in that place I’ll have the presence of mind to reread this and remember the rush.

Trouble with Time

16 Wednesday Feb 2011

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I’ve hit a problem with writing every day. For a while, it worked fantastically well to pull up a blank Word document when I got to work in the morning, type out a sentence or two whenever I had a moment and inspiration hit, and email myself the result at the end of the day. I was hitting anywhere from 200-1000 words in a day, making great progress on the story, but suddenly it’s not working anymore. The main issue I’m finding is that as my story progresses and complicates, it’s harder to remember where I left off. I’m starting to amass a collection of fragments and scenes without a solid connection to the previous pages of the story. When I get home, it’s about all I can do to sort out the general order of what takes place when, and more often than not I’m too tired to get in there and start writing the passages connecting what I’ve been working on. It’s getting to the point where I’m writing maybe three days a week, and I’m starting to feel frustrated. I’ve been trying to think what I should do instead, and the main idea I’ve got now is to take my laptop to work with me, so I can write on the Metro and maybe hit a few hundred words during lunch hour. It means lugging another bag around with me, but I’ll have to see if that helps me get back on track with keeping writing a priority.

The year of winning

06 Thursday Jan 2011

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Bring it, 2011. For about the last three years now, I have promised myself in New Year’s Resolutions that this was the year I was going to become a Successful Writer. I’ve come at it from all kinds of angles: write a novel, edit a bunch of short stories, produce a completed new piece every week, Get Published. So far? Goose egg.

I think part of the problem is that the aspirations I’ve been choosing are either too rigid (produce a new piece every week? that’s an invitation not to attempt a novel if ever I heard one), or externally based (whether I get published is at least as much up to the editors as it is to me. heck, if it were up to me I’d be a bestselling author by now). One of the pep talks in NaNo last November pointed out that the writing is what’s on the page. Anything else, glorious as it may be in the head of the writer, is just thought.

This year, I’m tackling the leap between the brain and the page. I’m trying to create resolutions that will encourage me to stretch myself as a writer, but also allow enough flexibility that having an off day once in a while won’t make me feel like I’ve failed. Here they are:

1. Write every day. The rules are that it must be creative, blog posts don’t count, and I have to give a good effort to finishing a piece I start, rather than ending up with a thousand opening lines by the end of 2011. Beyond that, if I write a sentence one day because I’m exhausted and the story’s not coming, so be it. I’m taking even that token time to dedicate to writing. So far this year, my low is 88 and my high is 524 in one day. Not NaNo numbers by any means, but I’m hitting a pretty steady 200-300, and hoping to increase as the year continues.

2. Blog once a week, minimum. This site does wonders to make me feel like I’m taking writing seriously, so even though I might have been using the time it took to write this post to work on my actual story, I think it’s worth it to make this blog and site an active part of my life. Besides, when I make it big and people search for me, don’t you think they should see something that has relatively recent content? Yeah, me too.

3. Read at least one book a week. Normally I’d scoff at such a basic “requirement,” but I’ve been finding that my new schedule gives me less time and energy to read than I’m really happy with. This is more of a safeguard to help me remember that reading is something that recharges me and gives me pleasure, and I don’t want to let it slide in favor of my other responsibilities. Plus, if I read a book per week, I can at least update what I’m reading here, so making time to read lots of awesome books will help me fulfill resolution #2. Double points!

Incidentally, I wish I could crank out 500 words of story as easily as 500 words of blog. My new system to make sure words happen has been to pull up a blank Word document when I get to work. Anytime I think of the next sentence of my story, I stop what I’m doing for fifteen seconds to write it down. Since I’m in front of a computer for eight hours a day, I thought, why not be thinking about stories for part of that time? So far it’s working out well. One particularly slow, particularly creative day, I had over 1000 words by closing time. On busier days, I’ll squeeze in just about 100. Anything helps push the story along, though, right?  know I have all of one reader right now, but if anyone comes across this and has other tips for how to fit writing into a cramped schedule, let me know!