Today I had every intention of working on Project Crunch (my chick lit idea), but when I fired up the laptop and went to Documents I ended up being drawn into Project Blake instead. I've been finding lately that I think of snippets of ideas and changes that I want to make - either while at work (oops, if you're reading boss - I write them down and get straight back to the day job, honest!) or driving, or falling asleep. Today I just went into Blake to make one of those changes and have ended up working on it all day. It makes me wonder how more established writers keep themselves disciplined to focus on one thing at a time..?
I'm also finding that now I have this dedicated writing time every Wednesday, I do struggle with just letting the words come. I'm something of a perfectionist (in everything, not just writing) and it is a real struggle not to self-edit as I'm going along, or to spend ages trying to think of precisely the right word, when instead I should probably just type everything as it comes to mind to get the action and the scene down, then go back and look at the fine detail another time. I wonder whether anybody knows of a way of overcoming this?
Also this week, the analytical part of my subconscious has pushed its way forward and made me set up a graph to monitor the word counts of my projects. Whether this is a good idea or not in terms of motivation I don't know, but I do like a nice graph so it'll stay! I don't think there's any way of posting it on here, but in case you're interested, today's standings are:
Project Blake: 1500
Project Crunch: 214 (this is why I was intending to work on it today)
Project Witch: 1430
Witch is an idea for a children's/Young Adult story that I had aaaaaaages ago, started writing, then as usual got distracted by other ideas. I found the draft I'd started on a memory stick recently so have added it to my stable of projects. I find that when I read my own writing back later I really like it - it's just while I'm working on it that I feel it's appallingly bad and going nowhere! I wonder if every writer is like that?
"All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." ~ Walt Disney
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What about your "Hitched" book? I see it's not listed with your projects.
ReplyDeleteHi hiddenmickey
ReplyDeleteUm, confession time - 'Hitched' has zero words so far... #blush#
I think there's a lot of research to do before I get started on drafting on that one - I'd hate to write a couple of chapters, do some more research, come up with a great idea and think 'oh this is cool - I'll have to go back and add this into those first chapters'.
Knowing me, I would end up getting stuck in a never-ending cycle of re-writing the same sections in a quest for unobtainable perfection!
Thanks for reading! :o)