The True Writer's Block - First Drafts

I need a bit of a break from the fiction for today so I’m writing this instead. It’s just one of those days.

About a month ago I got into a discussion with a friend about writing and the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery and it spawned the idea of this post. You can find the discussion in the comments of Indre Viskontas’ Effortless Mastery post.

I believe in writer’s block. I do NOT believe that it is something that causes you to be unable to write, despite having suffered from it for very long stretches of time in the past. That is simply a misunderstanding that occurs when you run into a speed bump during your writing. Sometimes things come to you quickly, other times it doesn’t. Those are the times you feel like you’re blocked.

Over the years I have come to think of writing as being very similar to sculpture. Michaelangelo said “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

Writers too must do this, chipping away at our blocks to reveal a beautiful story or a novel. The main difference between the writer and and the sculptor is that we as writers have to create our blocks first. We do this by writing a first draft.

There are plenty of ways to write a first draft. You can do it slowly and carefully, editing as you go, valuing quality over quantity and/or speed. You can do it all in a rush, ignoring problems in a reckless, headlong dash to get it all down, valuing quantity (or speed) over quality; this is the NaNoWriMo method. But either way you need to end up with your first draft when you’re done.

First drafts are just the starting point. The REAL work begins when the first draft is done. You’ve got your block. Now you have to carve it, shape it, chisel away at it, fine-tune it and polish it into something ‘shaped and perfect in attitude and action.’

Embrace your writer’s block, and then break it, and reshape it. Your writing will thank you for it.

Motivation in Crisis - Word Targets to the Rescue

Anyone who’s here reading this blog is surely aware that I’m taking part in National Novel Writing Month this year. (You can add me as a writing buddy there if you like!) NaNoWriMo is a daunting task; writing 50,000 words in a month while juggling the rest of one’s life is tricky at the best of times.

Earlier this year I discovered Scrivener, which has for several years been a Mac-only writer’s first drafting tool. It’s now available for Windows, allowing me to discover the joys and pains of using it. In particular I’ve discovered a way to use it to increase motivation and get the words flowing.

Scrivener has a fantastic Targets feature. It allows you to set a word target or character target. This is nothing more and nothing less than a counter in which you say “I want to write 5000 words.” It then throws a progress bar down at the bottom of the work window. It starts in the red and gradually transitions to green as you approach your target.

This can be a double-edged sword, however. When I first started using it, I would set goals in the thousands. Usually 1,667, the daily average for NaNoWriMo, or sometimes I’d round it up to 5,000. This has the effect of letting you work for what feels like a long time, only to glance down and see that you’re still in the red on your word count.

This can be frustrating, demoralizing, and can give you a feeling of futility. “Only 300 words done? I thought I had way more than that!”

The answer I’ve come up with is so incredibly simple I’m ashamed it took me so long to come up with it. I simply set my initial target to 250 words.

250 words is a very low goal. It’s no more than a few decent-sized paragraphs. You can blow through that in no time. And when you do, you reset the target to 500 words. Only 250 more to go. And now your progress bar is already half full, because of that first 250 set you wrote. When you reach 500, set it to 750. And so on. And so on.

For me, it leaves me always feeling like I’m making good progress. The bar is almost always in the green, and that brief time at the start when you’re at 0 and just beginning, it advances out of the red so fast it’s a reward in itself.

Scrivener is by far my favorite tool, but you should be able to accomplish something similar with any writing app that supports word targets. Some other examples are FocusWriter for Windows/Mac/Linux, and Q10 for Windows. With a little work, you could even manage it in Word, though you’d have to remember to check your word counts manually once in a while, and that will get distracting and probably harm your writing flow more than it’ll help.

A Good Day

Response to my sudden availability for work has been pretty encouraging today. I don't want to jinx anything by talking about it too early, but let's say for now that I no longer feel like I was laid off yesterday. I was set free.

A Bad Day

Today was a less than stellar day. Off in the real world at the day job, 110ish people were let go to general downsizing. That guy has a real attitude problem, and I'm one of the ones he set his sights on.

I don't intend to allow this to distract me from the NaNoWriMo challenge. Writing is my strongest skill, and this site has just become a very important way to show that off. GeekBeat.TV will show my blogging style; this site will show my creative, fictional style.

Expect daily updates on my NaNoWriMo progress. By updates, I mean I will be writing publicly and posting what I write here.

Game on.

A Writing Experiment

I’m probably a little crazy, but I really want to get back into writing creatively. I’ve had a taste of it at my day job, and it has reminded me of just how much I miss it.

With that in mind I’m undertaking 2 potentially insane projects.

The first is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which participants write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days throughout November.

The second is something I’m just doing on my own; I intend to write one short story and publish it here, roughly once a week. And yes, I intend to do that through November too. Maybe my 50,000 word novel will end up being a collection of short stories. It’s hard to say.

Here goes nothing…