Postby charlesp » Sun Sep 18, 2011 9:04 am
I think I'm more like you Jill... the stresses of life bog me down, though they also make me think "gee I want to write" (actually I think it might be more appropriate for me to say "gee I want to create" as sometimes it makes me want to write, sometimes to play music, sometimes to build puppets, sometimes to paint) even if they don't help me with the motivation to do so.
Friday night I ended my 168-ish day streak of doing 750words.com every day. I managed to get through Dragon*Con and still get my words in each day, but I was felled by an evening baseball game with my 8yo that I hadn't thought would run as late as it did. Granted, I did get the words written before I went to bed, but I missed the midnight deadline for it to "count"... which doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things. I like that I have a 'writing habit' now that I've never had before. It's not unlike the way they prescribe birth control pills. There are placebo days most of the time because it's better to take it every day than it is to try and remember an odd pattern. Likewise with writing, I think it works better to write every day, even if many of those days are pure drivel, because that means you'll still be writing on the days when something good bubbles up to the top of your brain and onto the page. If you're not writing every day there very well may be times when those ideas just set below the surface of your brain and you miss them or lose them.
One of my largest fears when it comes to writing is that I've got no ideas. Only occasionally do I feel "oh that's an interesting idea" and have it be anything that might carry a story more than a few hundred words. Part of that is my own damn fault for reading so much about writing as well as reading so many genres of novels so that I have the worst time getting past the part of my brain that says "that idea you just had is almost exactly the same as X" because that part of my brain kills most of my ideas on the vine, or after a few hundred words anyway. The 750 words thing has only given me a few short stories and a lot of journaling and thinking about other subjects, and the short stories almost never start with an idea. The fiction almost always starts with just throwing a few words on a page when I don't have a good rant/journal/etc in my head waiting to get out... which probably feeds into the way none of them work out to be anything long enough to "count".
Disclaimer: I'm mainly referring to fiction writing above, but if I don't mention fiction every time and dismiss other writing as not counting I get the fun of annoying my cyber-sibling Xcheck24
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C Clarke
"Coffee is sufficiently advanced technology" - Merlin Mann
One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee." - Wally (Dilbert)
