On the flavors of writing

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:11:58 GMT

For as long as I can remember, people have told me that I should be a writer. Which makes it every flavor of ironic that I have never made any advancement whatsoever in such a direction. --I lie; there is a carefully-hidden plastic binder containing a number of scrawled pages produced at approximately age 14 that embody the worst type of Mary Sue-ified teenage crap you can imagine; and even at that tender age I couldn't re-read them without cringing. But other than that minor fit, no. Why should that be? I'm certainly a more-than-competent wordsmith; why have I never made a conscious decision to focus on that skill? ( Time to unpack. )

comments

A few writing resolutions

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:28:35 GMT

As previously threatened, I have this week started getting up earlier (6am), I do half an hour of yoga, make a cup of tea, and then write for half an hour. Heretofore, "writing" has meant "morning pages", but what came out of said pages today--coupled with a sudden screeching left turn last night into a whole new distracting line of potential 14th century research--is that I also want to increase my output of semi-public production, whether that be organized personal nattering here, creative writing ... elsewhere, research essays, or posts to the blog nedlnthred keeps trying to get us to collectively start. At the moment, I am leaning towards preserving that half-hour for morning pages; I think their role as Colon Cleanse For Your Brain is critical. Moreover, if I actually get into a serious writing groove, I don't want to have it arbitrarily cut short by having to proceed to work. (But I can flag things in that brain dump to write about or research later.)

I have decided to give myself permission to take the equivalent of a coffee break at work to write small posts like this one; I will accordingly reduce the rest of my usual fuckin'-around-on-intarwubs periods. Not that I have oodles of it anyways, but what I have is better spent thus than hitting reload on Facebook for the umpteenth time.

For more in-depth writing, well... I haven't historically had a lot of success with reserving a regular evening or time slot for $PERSONAL_THING, though I understand that's how Serious Writers roll; for me, the exigencies of the moment have always steamrollered it. "Oh, but I gotta do laundry." "Oh, but I gotta pay bills." "Oh, I just don't feel it tonight." I could try that again--and actually commit to it this time, make it a priority--or, the technique which worked for the last couple of knitting projects, is to commit not an entire evening to $THING, but set aside 1-2 hours. With knitting or sewing, it was a little easier; I could say "I'm going to watch one episode of Burn Notice/two episodes of Tiger & Bunny/[etc.] and do handwork" and that reserved a clearly defined chunk of time, but also left enough of the evening to eat, clean up, and do a couple chores as needed. I feel that writing and research will be more difficult to parcel out this way, but if I don't, I think it will keep not ever happening.

comments

serinde

On the flavors of writing

A few writing resolutions