Darcy
I've been into a one-legged ass-kicking contest with myself over the last few days or so and finally stopped yesterday. I've been kicking myself over a few things and of course one of them is my writing.
I was thinking that no matter how hard I try I can’t get the writing in gear. It’s like I think about writing, sit down in front of the computer, then nothing. I can analyze this to death (which I have already) or I can find a solution that will work. Yesterday I had a thought: I can write a thousand words a day. Because once I sit down at the keyboard I just let my fingers fly along the keyboard. Now I’ve got a Word file open so I can actually see how many words I am producing at a given time.
Numbers are not the be-all-end-all but they are a concrete way of seeing progress. Watching a word count figure, seeing the growing number of pages, counting down to deadline and seeing progress on schedule- these are not things to be afraid of. As much as I like to think I’m all free-spirit and scatter-brained in reality I like organization and routine. I do get a visceral thrill out of charts and spreadsheets and cleaning and organizing. I might as well channel that into something productive.
Years ago I did a program called Morning Pages (it’s from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron). Morning Pages are three pages hand-written daily and are not to be edited or revised in any way. It helped me a lot back then but I don’t hand-write anymore and three pages of my daily bullshit is not the solution for me at present.
What is a solution for me is this:
1) Daily blog entry of a 1000 words (or less- I won’t pressure myself to hit a thousand if it’s just not going to happen) I also have a list of blog topics if I don’t have something for the day to begin with.
2) Work on my Darcy book (I have an outline I need to refine and organize)
3) Work on revisions for my novel (printed out the last draft and have it all nice and neat in a three-ring binder and a pencil bag with pencils, pens, highlighters, and sticky notes)
Writing is like anything else you do- you have to do it every day to get good at it. Years ago the great violinist Isaac Stern was stopped by a couple of tourists as he was walking to Carnegie Hall for a concert. The tourists asked how do you get to Carnegie Hall and Mr. Stern replied, “Practice, practice, practice.” The tourists just wanted to know which way to walk but Mr. Stern replied with the way to get on the stage there.
So the lesson from the previous paragraph is that you can walk the street but to get on the stage you’ve got to do the work. With writing there’s just one way to get there: write. Every single day if possible and have goals and even deadlines. If a goal is a thousand words a day, revise a chapter a day, or whatever then that’s the map.
