Write Every Day: 08 August 02019

[silveradept]

Greetings! This is the Write Every Day Check-in post for 08 August 02019.

Apparently, I stumbled onto something wise yesterday in comparing writing to breadmaking. Sometimes you have to work a lot at it, kneading it, working it, stretching it, getting it into shape and adding the ingredients at the right time, and sometimes you have to leave it alone in a warm drawer or a hot oven and wait until its ready.

Not every day is going to be 3000 words toward a novel. Sometimes the ideas need some rest and to prove in the background until they're ready for what happens next.

I am apparently taking my own advice on this for a bit - I wrote this entry, and some kind words in the program, and the weekly roundup bits, and I might go back at the WIP that's not exchange-related for a bit tonight, but I'm not really running hard in the words department right now. Maybe when some more source for the Giving of Grief gets in, I'll start knocking down a few thousand words of WTF at a time.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 1: alexcat, alexseanchai, athaia, auroracloud, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, shopfront, silveradept, sonia, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 2: alexcat, alexseanchai, athaia, auroracloud, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, shopfront, silveradept, sonia, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 3: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, shopfront, silveradept, sonia, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 4: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, bladespark, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, shopfront, silveradept, sonia, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 5: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, silveradept, shopfront, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 6: alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, silveradept, sonia, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 7: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, boxofdelights, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, magnetic_pole, sanguinity, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme.

People who have checked in with writing on Day 8: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, boxofdelights, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, sanguinity, silveradept, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yasaman, ysilme.

Comments

[china_shop]

9th: Got great beta notes back on my flashfic and am rewriting. Deadline in about 40 hours away, so feeling some pressure. :-)

[silveradept]

Oh, last-minute rewrites. That's all sorts of fun. Hope you get it all done in time!

[boxofdelights]

I'm up to a total of 590 words today.

[silveradept]

Yay, words!

[alexseanchai]

Oh hey, I hit 300 tumblr followers! I should write a 300-word fic to celebrate!

—uh

[silveradept]

It never stays 300 words. Not without tight planning and possibly a beta or editor.

[alexseanchai]

does so

I recognize that my tags are shooting my own argument in the foot here

[silveradept]

Okay. An octople drabble as a five times thing does make sense.

[alexseanchai]

(it was supposed to be a sextuple drabble…)

[silveradept]

Ah, so that's the "sometimes it stays close to what it was supposed to be" example, then.

[alexcat]

100 word drabble and 199 on some revisions.

[silveradept]

Excellent.

[yasaman]

and sometimes you stick the dough in the freezer for a few months and then you come back to it and are like, "huh, that's some good dough," and you start defrosting it in preparation for eventual baking. which is to say, I did a reread of 14k worth of a WIP I'd set aside in favor of my current one, and it's good, and I'm excited to return to it when I finish a draft of my current WIP.

which, speaking of other current wip, 1,052 words today!

[silveradept]

Yay, words! And yay for going back to a WIP and thinking it is good enough to go back to.

[alexseanchai]

\o/

[talkingtothesky]

Still trying to rest and heal my arms, so almost no writing this week. Day 8 I felt so guilty I wrote 500 words regardless.

[silveradept]

Yay for words, although guilt doesn't seem like the right idea for motivation? Especially if healing arms is intended.

[carenejeans]

I like your comparison of writing to bread-baking. I'm sort of kneading the dough in a slow, contemplative way at the moment. 8-)

580 words on the essay, not quite free-writing, but just thinking on paper (well, on keyboard & screen). This will later be distilled down. A lot!

[silveradept]

Thinking on paper is sometimes how I get past blocks. I keep writing until I realize I've worked around the problem and then go back to do it more intentionally.

[auroracloud]

I got some story ideas and wrote them down, and wrote an idea/synopsis bit for a scene/chapter for my novel. I need to get back to doing my writing earlier in the day so I get around to a bit more of it...

[silveradept]

Finding time to do writing is tough. Finding enough time to do writing is tougher.

[ysilme]

I missed that bit about the bread-making yesterday, but I couldn't agree more! One of the things of the WED challenge I love is that I can feel good about my writing every day, and not lose my motivation because I feel I haven't done anything useful, writing-wise, but still just follow the flow of the words and stories. For me, yesterday wasn't really creative, writing-wise, so I'm reporting only about 200 words of writing-related comments to someone (which I don't hesitate to count as they were writing related and I know will bring me forward eventually), but I drew instead. I've recently discovered zentangles and spent most of my usual writing time doodling instead. And find that today, I've new ideas about a WIP I was stuck with, so this also contributed to my writing.

[silveradept]

Oh, zentangles are nice. Doodling and coloring and giving the brain something to work on long enough to untangle something else works pretty well.

I did the bread thing in a comment thread yesterday late in the day, by accident, so I thought it might be useful to make it a little more foregrounded.

[sylvanwitch]

I like the breadmaking analogy. I think it's quite apt, and I can definitely relate to it, as well. My trouble is that I often don't want to leave it alone; I get impatient and antsy. This is a good reminder that leaving it alone is an active part of the process, even if it feels like the opposite.

I spent most of yesterday visiting with a friend, and when I got home, the editing just didn't want to happen, so I ended up writing a poem about the things that were distracting me from the editing. I figure that counts for words, anyway.

[silveradept]

That totally counts as writing, and sometimes doing something else is the easiest way for us to give a story the time it needs to settle and otherwise get ready for the next round of work.

[cornerofmadness]

874 for Like stone, better but not good enough. The breadmaking analogy is a good one

[silveradept]

Thanks. Better is still better even if it's not as good as you want it right now.

[cornerofmadness]

So very true

[sanguinity]

My main reservation about doing WED when I joined last month was that I do need time for the bread to proof, as you put it, and generally only have productive writing days every other day. But my writing habits had been shifting so that I seemed to be doing a lot of daily fiddling instead of every-other-day get-this-scene-down blitzes -- and anyway, alibi sentences exist, so I could still do my natural every-other-day rhythm, if that kicked back in. Happily, the alibi sentences fit very naturally into my rhythm of "some days I write and some days I consider possibilities for what I'm going to write next."

Speaking of alibi sentences, we just got back from vacation:

Monday August 5: Alibi sentence.

Tuesday August 6: 300 words.

Wednesday August 7: Alibi sentence.

Thursday August 8: Alibi sentence.

All of these, btw, were on a sequel to that story I couldn't quite finish before I left for vacation. I'm not sure I the proposed sequel is even a proper story? It's just something I'm enjoying noodling at, in a potentially-going-nowhere sort of way. But whatever, it's vacation, having fun going nowhere is all but the very definition of vacation!

[silveradept]

It is indeed the definition of vacation, and we are glad you are finding the rhythm that works for you.

[lferion]

150-odd words I think belong with the reverse bang story, if not necessarily in it, if that makes sense.

[silveradept]

That makes sense. Sometimes you write a thing and realize you've written the template for what you want to write, or it's something you need to keep in mind while writing, even if it never makes it to the story proper.