New Year, New Writing
Jan. 4th, 2023 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedaceI have remembered the trick to getting really into writing: it's to have two or three days of doing nothing at all, so that by the end of the third day I am bored / unwound enough to sit down and splurge ten pages by hand. A little tough to replicate regularly, but I'm glad it still works!
I'm not back at work until Monday, I only have a few life-admin things to get done this week, and all my friends are back at work, meaning that now I've started to wake up again after not enough sleep on NYE, I'm free to really devote the remainder of the week to gently making the most of writing time.
I kicked it off yesterday evening by showing up to the first weekly write-together group of the year, even though I didn't expect to get anything done, and after a half hour of haltingly writing down random shit about my day, I jumped into a couple of pages from a key character's backstory, which was more fun than the alleged "present timeline" I had in mind for the story.
This afternoon, I went out to my usual Friday pub (on a Wednesday!) and spent an hour writing out something totally unrelated as a warm up - a sort of short story / scene starting from my walk to the pub and winding up in a sort of urban fantasy place. I think it's more of a scene from something larger than a short in its own right, but I actually wrapped up the scene where normally I tend to get into the middle and give up, so that was nice. After that, I circled back to the character from last night and wrote a bit of follow-on, and, my god, this is the first time with this story that I've felt like one of the alleged protagonists actually wants to go somewhere and do something. What a feeling! (I'm a classic worldbuilder: I have reams of notes about the history of this place, and I could write you a hundred go-nowhere lyrical descriptions of settings, but getting characters to move around in my little playdoh world is where I have to work harder.)
I'm calling that a successful afternoon, and am going to just chill out this evening. I'm definitely having another session (my "usual") on Friday; tomorrow, I need to be in for a delivery, but perhaps if I get some tidying done in the morning I will be able to sit down and write in the afternoon.
I'm not back at work until Monday, I only have a few life-admin things to get done this week, and all my friends are back at work, meaning that now I've started to wake up again after not enough sleep on NYE, I'm free to really devote the remainder of the week to gently making the most of writing time.
I kicked it off yesterday evening by showing up to the first weekly write-together group of the year, even though I didn't expect to get anything done, and after a half hour of haltingly writing down random shit about my day, I jumped into a couple of pages from a key character's backstory, which was more fun than the alleged "present timeline" I had in mind for the story.
This afternoon, I went out to my usual Friday pub (on a Wednesday!) and spent an hour writing out something totally unrelated as a warm up - a sort of short story / scene starting from my walk to the pub and winding up in a sort of urban fantasy place. I think it's more of a scene from something larger than a short in its own right, but I actually wrapped up the scene where normally I tend to get into the middle and give up, so that was nice. After that, I circled back to the character from last night and wrote a bit of follow-on, and, my god, this is the first time with this story that I've felt like one of the alleged protagonists actually wants to go somewhere and do something. What a feeling! (I'm a classic worldbuilder: I have reams of notes about the history of this place, and I could write you a hundred go-nowhere lyrical descriptions of settings, but getting characters to move around in my little playdoh world is where I have to work harder.)
I'm calling that a successful afternoon, and am going to just chill out this evening. I'm definitely having another session (my "usual") on Friday; tomorrow, I need to be in for a delivery, but perhaps if I get some tidying done in the morning I will be able to sit down and write in the afternoon.
