So I’m glad I gave myself the week ‘off’. I was able to finish my specific measurable result, in which I just wrote out the scenes in that folder. I’m not happy with it but I did it.
On the last DIYMFA 101 Q&A call I brought up this point to Gabriela and she says she has learned that she needs to write despite whether she feels good or bad about what comes out. It’s the first piece of advice she’s given that really hasn’t sat well with me.
I am certainly to the point in my writing career where I can just sit down and force myself to write because it’s time to write. Sometimes I don’t want to, sometimes it comes out pretty rough but most of the time I feel like I am able to push through the ‘ick’ to something that works. So the idea that I’m somehow supposed to write something, and dislike/hate it, but then have that be a part of my book is …well counterintuative at best.
I am beginning to feel like a broken record as things keep not working, but I am continuing to looking for new methods for working through this revision.
I spent part of this week thinking back to how things used to be with my writing. I remember just writing a story. Just writing it and not having any sort of plan. Now I feel like I’m so worried about the craft that I just get stuck.
The feeling between the beginning of this story (the one I’ve been writing the revision blog about in specific) and the end is just so …different. I really wish someone could just come down and tell me why I’m having such trouble. Is it my lack of structure? Is it my over-reliance on structure? Are the characters not developed enough? Is the world not developed enough? Does the story suck?
Part of me wants to be able to finish a novel length story just so I have the fact that I have done it to hang in front of myself. Right now I’m grasping at a future that I have to convince myself I can achieve with no actual proof.
Huh, I wrote that and then realized: Well that’s life isn’t it? Everything we do, we have no idea we’ll be able to do it until we do it. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like that.
I love my neat little list of what to do with the dates and the plan of it all. I also don’t think it’s working.
I sit down to write and nothing works. I am stuck in my head about where the story is supposed to go, what my outline says I should do, and omg, I have to write a blog post on Friday …
So I’m going back to something that has worked for me in the past. And that is giving myself a word count goal. Something that I often tell myself when I’m stuck is that the answer (to my stuck spot) is out there somewhere. There is some series of events, some actions the characters can take, which make the story make sense. It exists, and all I have to do is find it.
And in order to find it I just have to write. I think better on ‘paper’. Obviously writing an outline is just not doing it for me. It helps me organize stuff I’ve already written just fine, but it seems to be seriously hindering me in my push forward. I get too caught up in where my outline says I should be going that I don’t let the story develop naturally.
My specific measurable result for this week is 750 words a day. So 5250 words through next Thursday. I’m not limiting myself on what I’m going to write. I am just going to get words on the page without thought to where I’m going or what I’m expecting myself to produce, and we’ll see what happens.
