Make Writing a Job
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | No Comments
I’ve talked before about scheduling writing, treating it as a job, but even I forget my own advice sometimes. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been pining for the day when I had the luxury to write the book that has been forming in my head for several months. When I got the idea, I jotted down several notes, then went away, sad that I had to wait to write it.
Then I got around to setting up a time management system and just for the heck of it decided to put “Write Old Magic” on it for an hour every morning. (Okay, not quite “just of the heck of it.” Finding time to write was one of the reasons I wanted the system in the first place.) I’ve been keeping to that time commitment since then. I’m not a slave to it, of course; yesterday I had a breakfast meeting at the time of that hour, so I moved the hour down. This morning I had to cut it to around 45 minutes, but did those 45 minutes diligently.
I started writing this novel just like I recommend starting a short story, by deciding what I needed and imagining the specifics of those people, places and events.
Now I have several pages of notes and am starting to get to that wonderful point when I’m thinking about the story spontaneously during the day and night, where my subconscious is starting to have fun with me and flicking out little bits of wonderful data about my people, their culture, what they look like and how they interact. Some of it is going in the direction I had planned, I do have a very specific theme for this book, but some of it is taking some delightful (and a bit delightfully dark) turns and entering in to areas of the psyche I hadn’t realized would be involved.
Another thing I like to do is just get the ideas down, the thoughts, the imaginings, then look at them and see if they are hackneyed, cliche, un-thought-out, illogical, etc., then ask myself questions. “If this is true, how can this also be true?” or “Okay, that’s been done so many times since the invention of myth that it looks like a Xerox copy. How can I turn that on it’s ear?”
I either answer the questions as soon as they’re asked, even having a discussion with myself on paper about them, or let them ferment a bit. The answers to those questions, or the discussions I have with myself about them, are usually the very things that make the story rich for me, and, hopefully, will make it alive for a reader.
I love the delightful obsession, this passion, when it comes over me and I really love that I have the ability to engender it. And it becomes this passion simply because I treat it like a job.
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