A few years ago I finally figgered out a really obvious thing: that writing’s only one part inspiration\/ability. Duh, I know. But there I was, waiting for the spirit of F. Scott to sieze control of my spine, to toss me into my deskchair and start my finger bones pounding out Gatsby II: The Reckoning<\/i>. And it weren’t happening.
\nThrough fits and also through starts, I figured out a few get-yourself-to-write techniques that seem to help. For a while now, I’ve meant to blog about these, to keep track of them, to share them, and to see if anyone out there wants to jump in with a technique or three of their own. One of my habits changed recently, so I thought that might make for a good opportunity to kick this off. I’m talking of course, about notebooks.
\nI subscribe to the big-notebook, little-notebook school o’ thought, wherein a little notebook is kept in pocket to jot down random ideas, dialog, observation, and shtick that arrive at unexpected moments (this came from Anne Lamotte, author of my beloved Bird by Bird<\/i>) who talks about always having a few index cards shoved in your back pocket.) The big notebook is for what Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way<\/i>) calls “morning pages” — three pages a day, written every day, to uncork whatever ferment you’ve got in ya.
\nFor the last six months or so, I’ve dropped from doing morning pages most days to writing three pages once or twice a week. Part of the problem was that three pages was a big enough forced-writing mandate that it only fit into my two chunks of scheduled writing time on the weekend. Also, it had pretty much devolved into pure journal. Which is not entirely a bad thing. I like having a running record of life as it’s lived. But it wasn’t really what I was looking for.
\nSo I made two minor changes about a week ago that seem to be helping: (1) I cut down my per-page obligation to just one little page a day. A small enough bite that I can work it into my commute, or my the-kids-are-being-read-stories-by-my-better-half time. (2) Journalling is still part of the process, but each day I make sure I also write at least one paragraph of fiction. And I try to keep it a little random. No more of that “there’s a guy, and he’s sitting in a coffee shop stuff” I tend to write when, as a guy, I find myself sitting in a coffee shop.
\nSo far, it’s an improvement. I wrote all but one day over the last week. And with the no-pressure-groove that comes with the one-page minimum, I find I’m shpieling a bit and ending up with a few extra pages most days. All told, I have something like 16 pages from the last week instead of the usual 3-6. Oh yeah, it helped that I also went to a smaller size notebook….
\nSo OK, enough about me. What about youse? Any writing techniques you care to share today, notebookly or otherwise?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years ago I finally figgered out a really obvious thing: that writing’s only one part inspiration\/ability. Duh, I know. But there I was, waiting for the spirit of F. Scott to sieze control of my spine, to toss me into my deskchair and start my finger bones pounding out Gatsby II: The Reckoning. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-and-also-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}