As many of you know I had a very uncertain start to writing. I started my journey not really knowing where I'd end up or if I would even end up at all.
In the past, when I would get a little stuck I would begin to doubt myself and think, what am I doing? There's no way I can write a book, this is just another example of why I can't.
I am pleased to announce that I have crossed a bridge of sorts. I apparently have decided to start believing in myself and I didn't even realize I was doing it for a few days...
It happened last week. I was working on some dialogue between my hero and my heroine and I was just not feeling it. The chemistry wasn't right and I felt like I was jumping the gun on the outcome of the scene. I needed to regroup and rethink the whole thing.
The last time this happened to me, it sent me into a tailspin I had a hard time coming out of.
This time, I realized this wasn't going the way I wanted and after a few seconds I thought, well I'll just fix it later and pushed through to finish up my 750 words.
That's it, that was my revelation and I completely missed it at the time. I think that the fact that I missed it really tells me something too. It wasn't a momentous enough of a thing at the time that I felt I needed to pat myself on the back.
No, it wasn't until about three days later I was actually laying in bed and rethinking my scene. What was I trying to accomplish with this scene? How did I want it to ultimately end up? How was this moving my story forward? Then, what I had thought to myself that night I was writing hit me like a bolt of lightning!
I realized that I thought the scene was no good and I didn't think to myself that I needed to quit because I was never going to become a writer. No, I said, I'll just fix it later.
My subconscious had apparently worked out the fact that I was actually doing this and though it was rough, it wasn't half bad.
It's too bad it took my conscious mind a few days to catch up. My subconscious, she's a sly one! She does this to me all the time!
I think I'm done working on something and then a thought will pop into my head out of the blue and sometimes it's intense enough that I need to share it! My husband is constantly giving me a hard time on my swift change in topics or my ability to be doing many things at once.
So I'm happy to say that writing a bad scene no longer sends me into an emotional tailspin that I have work extra hard to come out of. Those 5 words really changed a lot for me and I had no idea at the time!
It's fun to feel my confidence growing. Of course I only knew my confidence was growing because a scene came along that knocked me down a peg or two.
The difference this time is, I know I will work it out. That's what editing is for! I don't need to compare myself to anyone but me. Just keep swimming and all that Jazz.
I'm going to make it to the end of this, even if it never gets published I will at least know that I was able to do something I set out to do. And you know what, I feel pretty good about that!
Monday, April 29, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Guest Blogger - Matt
First and foremost let me say this. What happened today in Boston was horrific and may never really be truly understood.
I grieve for the victims of the bombings today at the Marathon's finish line, and I await the day the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice.
Tonight I had an appointment that left little time for me to write a blog entry myself. I asked my friend Matt, who was the subject of last week's post, to write up a little something to keep the momentum going.
So without further ado, I give you Matt.
Let me open with a clarification: I am not Jess. I’m her friend Matt. I’m three days younger, several dozen pounds heavier, and have no internal filter to speak of. You have my sincere apologies in advance.
Jess reached out to me this morning and asked if I’d mind throwing together a ‘Guest Blog’ for tonight, as her dance card was full up for the day, and she wasn’t going to be able to find the time to write her regularly scheduled blog. I took a look at my own brimming schedule for the day, then shrugged and said “The hell with it. Sure.”
I spent some time thinking about some different topics that might be interesting to ramble on about… Writing with Internet ADD… Novels vs Short Stories… The Catch-22 around Agent Desires and Publisher Desires…. But in the end, I decided to basically write a ‘Mirror Post’ to what Jess put up last week – Peer Reviews.
In my opinion, Peer Reviews are incredibly difficult to do properly, because it’s a two person process. Obviously, the person giving the review needs to do things a certain fashion, so that they’re providing good feedback without harping on the minuscule or otherwise tearing the piece to shreds, but just as importantly, the one receiving the feedback needs to have the correct mindset for it.
Last week, Jess hit on some of the emotions that go into letting someone else look at your work… it’s more or less stark, nail-biting, terror. Odds are you’ve worked your ass off writing something and have potentially spent hours on that one section once you start doing revisions. Additionally, there’s a good possibility that you’re completely convinced you might have written trite garbage that no one will ever want to read, and you should probably quit and go take up a different hobby where nobody will judge your work. So handing that piece of work to someone else takes no small amount of guts (and probably a solid shot of liquor or two to steel the nerves).
I had the ‘easier’ role of the two last week… I sent Jess about a half dozen pages from a section of my short story that, frankly, I hated. It was a necessary part of the story, but I just didn’t like what I’d done there (so much so that I’ve decided to shelve that work for a couple weeks and focus on another piece, for submission to a different Anthology. That’s how self-confident I am over what I’d written). Jess came back with some good pieces of feedback, and said that, overall, she didn’t think it was half bad… that definitely helped bolster my confidence a bit… perhaps I wasn’t writing COMPLETE Garbage… at least, there was a chance some of it could be redeemed.
This week, we changed roles a little bit… I reached out to Jess for a couple “What do you think about the formatting of this line…?” questions, and in turn, she sent me the first half of her Prologue to peek at.
At this point, it becomes very obvious to me that, while receiving criticism over your ‘baby’ is hard enough, they should, and probably do, teach college level courses on giving critiques. They’re incredibly hard for me, and I’ll tell you why…
I am the Grammar Police. Stick ‘em up.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t know a ‘dangling participle’ from my own elbow, I’d probably be a good copy editor, as the QA side of my brain has trained me to catch every silly little formatting issue. Spelling errors, punctuation failures, sentences that seem out of order… but for the level of Peer Review we’re doing, I know that Jess doesn’t give a damn. She’s handing me a piece that hasn’t undergone revision, and will be looking through it all again long before submitting it to a publisher. She doesn’t need copy editing, she needs feedback. The other thing she doesn’t need is someone to look at a paragraph and say “You know, here’s how I’d have done it.” – I’m not writing her story, she is. How she wants to use a turn of phrase is up to her, and dictated by her style.
So I turn off the part of my brain that’s looking at the little things, and instead look at the big picture and try and get some feedback for her… I let her know that I think she’s got a good opener… here are a few excellent hooks that caught my attention, and would keep me flipping pages… I like how this piece here is written… and so on. I briefly mention that I noticed some technical flaws that I think a pass of revision will clear up, but don’t harp on them because I want to make sure she’s getting the positive feedback that she’s not off course. Her ship is on the right heading, she just needs to tighten the rigging as it were.
Now, earmuffs kiddies, this isn’t to say that feedback should be a big circle-jerk where it’s all rainbows and smiles. It just turns out she sent me a piece I felt was good. It would have been even harder for me if she gave me something that had real flaws in it, because I’d still need to give her solid feedback in terms of “I don’t understand this character’s motivations…” and “…why bother doing this when she could obviously just do this other thing with a fraction of the difficulty?”, but would need to do it in a constructive manner, that didn’t come across in a way that would depress her… because then I’m not only not helping her process, I’m harming it by sucking away her motivation.
Done correctly, Peer Review is an incredibly powerful tool if you’ve got the right people helping you out. You’ll be able to see things from a reader’s point of view… get a second opinion when you’re wavering on a particular formatting method or story idea… and can generally make sure you’re not heading down a dead branch. The caveat is just that you need to make sure you’ve got the right people helping you out, so you’re gaining, rather than losing, motivation every time you hand a piece out.
I grieve for the victims of the bombings today at the Marathon's finish line, and I await the day the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice.
Tonight I had an appointment that left little time for me to write a blog entry myself. I asked my friend Matt, who was the subject of last week's post, to write up a little something to keep the momentum going.
So without further ado, I give you Matt.
Let me open with a clarification: I am not Jess. I’m her friend Matt. I’m three days younger, several dozen pounds heavier, and have no internal filter to speak of. You have my sincere apologies in advance.
Jess reached out to me this morning and asked if I’d mind throwing together a ‘Guest Blog’ for tonight, as her dance card was full up for the day, and she wasn’t going to be able to find the time to write her regularly scheduled blog. I took a look at my own brimming schedule for the day, then shrugged and said “The hell with it. Sure.”
I spent some time thinking about some different topics that might be interesting to ramble on about… Writing with Internet ADD… Novels vs Short Stories… The Catch-22 around Agent Desires and Publisher Desires…. But in the end, I decided to basically write a ‘Mirror Post’ to what Jess put up last week – Peer Reviews.
In my opinion, Peer Reviews are incredibly difficult to do properly, because it’s a two person process. Obviously, the person giving the review needs to do things a certain fashion, so that they’re providing good feedback without harping on the minuscule or otherwise tearing the piece to shreds, but just as importantly, the one receiving the feedback needs to have the correct mindset for it.
Last week, Jess hit on some of the emotions that go into letting someone else look at your work… it’s more or less stark, nail-biting, terror. Odds are you’ve worked your ass off writing something and have potentially spent hours on that one section once you start doing revisions. Additionally, there’s a good possibility that you’re completely convinced you might have written trite garbage that no one will ever want to read, and you should probably quit and go take up a different hobby where nobody will judge your work. So handing that piece of work to someone else takes no small amount of guts (and probably a solid shot of liquor or two to steel the nerves).
I had the ‘easier’ role of the two last week… I sent Jess about a half dozen pages from a section of my short story that, frankly, I hated. It was a necessary part of the story, but I just didn’t like what I’d done there (so much so that I’ve decided to shelve that work for a couple weeks and focus on another piece, for submission to a different Anthology. That’s how self-confident I am over what I’d written). Jess came back with some good pieces of feedback, and said that, overall, she didn’t think it was half bad… that definitely helped bolster my confidence a bit… perhaps I wasn’t writing COMPLETE Garbage… at least, there was a chance some of it could be redeemed.
This week, we changed roles a little bit… I reached out to Jess for a couple “What do you think about the formatting of this line…?” questions, and in turn, she sent me the first half of her Prologue to peek at.
At this point, it becomes very obvious to me that, while receiving criticism over your ‘baby’ is hard enough, they should, and probably do, teach college level courses on giving critiques. They’re incredibly hard for me, and I’ll tell you why…
I am the Grammar Police. Stick ‘em up.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t know a ‘dangling participle’ from my own elbow, I’d probably be a good copy editor, as the QA side of my brain has trained me to catch every silly little formatting issue. Spelling errors, punctuation failures, sentences that seem out of order… but for the level of Peer Review we’re doing, I know that Jess doesn’t give a damn. She’s handing me a piece that hasn’t undergone revision, and will be looking through it all again long before submitting it to a publisher. She doesn’t need copy editing, she needs feedback. The other thing she doesn’t need is someone to look at a paragraph and say “You know, here’s how I’d have done it.” – I’m not writing her story, she is. How she wants to use a turn of phrase is up to her, and dictated by her style.
So I turn off the part of my brain that’s looking at the little things, and instead look at the big picture and try and get some feedback for her… I let her know that I think she’s got a good opener… here are a few excellent hooks that caught my attention, and would keep me flipping pages… I like how this piece here is written… and so on. I briefly mention that I noticed some technical flaws that I think a pass of revision will clear up, but don’t harp on them because I want to make sure she’s getting the positive feedback that she’s not off course. Her ship is on the right heading, she just needs to tighten the rigging as it were.
Now, earmuffs kiddies, this isn’t to say that feedback should be a big circle-jerk where it’s all rainbows and smiles. It just turns out she sent me a piece I felt was good. It would have been even harder for me if she gave me something that had real flaws in it, because I’d still need to give her solid feedback in terms of “I don’t understand this character’s motivations…” and “…why bother doing this when she could obviously just do this other thing with a fraction of the difficulty?”, but would need to do it in a constructive manner, that didn’t come across in a way that would depress her… because then I’m not only not helping her process, I’m harming it by sucking away her motivation.
Done correctly, Peer Review is an incredibly powerful tool if you’ve got the right people helping you out. You’ll be able to see things from a reader’s point of view… get a second opinion when you’re wavering on a particular formatting method or story idea… and can generally make sure you’re not heading down a dead branch. The caveat is just that you need to make sure you’ve got the right people helping you out, so you’re gaining, rather than losing, motivation every time you hand a piece out.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Help Me, Help You, Help Me
As I have mentioned before a good friend of mine started to venture into the writing world around the same time I did. Like me, he had been sitting on some great ideas for sometime and finally worked up the confidence to jump in and start writing.
We had a really great chat a few months back just talking about how we got started. So one day when we were finalizing the plans for Matt and his wife to come babysit my kids I asked him how the writing was going.
I can't quote him directly but the gist of it was it wasn't going well and he hadn't really committed much time to it lately.
He mentioned a lot of distractions but I had a feeling he was letting himself be distracted from writing for reasons he wasn't really telling me. I thought this because everything he was telling me I had heard myself say before to others. I had been in a bit of a slump and looking back now I realized it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't really think I was doing such a great job writing and I was feeling a little down on myself.
I could see all this mirrored in my dear friend.
So being the bossy, domineering, and loving person that I am, I talked him into having a bit of a working session with me. I told him we could just talk it out. I was by no means an expert but sometimes if you just start saying stuff out loud to other people it starts thought processes you might not have kicked off by yourself.
Matt's story is a short sci-fi story set in the future. So I was asking a lot of questions about his world and the people of that time period in general. He was worrying that his characters didn't seem real and their interactions with each other were forced and unnatural. My hope, in asking the questions I did, was that it would help him better understand his characters and the world in which they live so he might better understand why people might react they way they do.
He had great answers for everything I threw at him. So it was obvious to me that background wasn't really his issue.
Matt was telling me was having a hard time with dialog, so I sent him a snippet of some dialog I had been working on that evening.
Let me just take a second to highlight that last point a bit. I sent him a snippet... of my book... that no one else has ever seen snippets of before...
I jokingly told him to feel special all the while I was sitting on the edge of my seat to see what he might have to say about what I wrote.
Here I was trying to help him with dialog and he could be reading mine thinking, this is worse than mine, she can't help me!
Matt was uncharacteristically quite for a minute or two, I started chewing on my nails. He did respond back but he just continued along with the conversation without mentioning my snippet!
We were doing all this over a chat so its very possible that he was in his own manuscript when I typed that to him and he just missed it. My brain, however, jumped right to the worst case scenario. He must be thinking it is awful.
I took a deep calming breath and reminded myself that tonight was not about me. I was determined to get his butt back in the writing chair if I had to drive over to his house and tie him to it.
We continued on back and forth for a bit longer when I finally said, ok just send me something, show me something you think is just utter crap and I will tell you what I think.
Matt and I have been friends for quite some time, we were once co-workers and we have collaborated on many, many projects in the past. It takes an insane amount of courage to send someone a chunk of your work if you love it, much more so if you hate it. I want to say that I was honored that Matt felt comfortable enough to show me something he felt was so horrible it made him want to stop writing all together.
He sent me about 4 pages of typed material via drop box and I set off to read it.
After a few (very intense for Matt, I'm sure) minutes I came back to tell him what I thought. I told him what I truly felt about it. I didn't think he was far off from the story he wanted to tell.
I think I surprised him. They say writers are their own worst critics and I think that was true for Matt. It's probably true for me too but we'll see.
I'm not a big sci-fi reader but I do enjoy them from time to time. I really enjoyed what I had read, I was able to follow all the sci-fi stuff because the context was well done and I genuinely wanted to know what happened to this guy after the scene I was given came to a close. That's hard to do in just a few paragraphs.
Matt had prefaced the whole thing with what he felt was wrong with it. His character feels like he isn't having enough of a reaction to the news he is given and the dialog felt, for lack of a better word, stiff.
I thought his character was having a reaction, but I could see what Matt was talking about. He wanted him to have a more intense reaction.
With Matt's permission I added about 20 words to a few paragraphs of his work and showed him with a few tweaks you can convey to the reader a more intense reaction without rewriting the entire conversation.
I think he liked what I had to show him, it also proved to him that he really wasn't that far away.
All this led to a conversation about the Show Don't Tell Rule in writing. Which is all I ended up adding when I threw in a few extra words.
This made me feel empowered to show Matt another snippet from my own writing where I am writing about my own character's reaction to something someone else said to her.
This time Matt did comment on it and he liked it, he really, really liked it!
His praise on my 2 small paragraph snippet sent me over the moon!
The whole conversation was just about an hour and I think it left us both feeling pretty jazzed up to do some more writing. In my opinion if that session did nothing more than motivate my friend, it was an hour well spent.
Matt, thanks for having a working session with me. We should be having those check ins every so often. Also thanks for letting me devote an entire blog entry to you and our conversation. If you're up for it, talk about what you've been up to since that night in the comments.
I have been promised that I will get to read his story when he's done! Yay, I can't wait!!!!
We had a really great chat a few months back just talking about how we got started. So one day when we were finalizing the plans for Matt and his wife to come babysit my kids I asked him how the writing was going.
I can't quote him directly but the gist of it was it wasn't going well and he hadn't really committed much time to it lately.
He mentioned a lot of distractions but I had a feeling he was letting himself be distracted from writing for reasons he wasn't really telling me. I thought this because everything he was telling me I had heard myself say before to others. I had been in a bit of a slump and looking back now I realized it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't really think I was doing such a great job writing and I was feeling a little down on myself.
I could see all this mirrored in my dear friend.
So being the bossy, domineering, and loving person that I am, I talked him into having a bit of a working session with me. I told him we could just talk it out. I was by no means an expert but sometimes if you just start saying stuff out loud to other people it starts thought processes you might not have kicked off by yourself.
Matt's story is a short sci-fi story set in the future. So I was asking a lot of questions about his world and the people of that time period in general. He was worrying that his characters didn't seem real and their interactions with each other were forced and unnatural. My hope, in asking the questions I did, was that it would help him better understand his characters and the world in which they live so he might better understand why people might react they way they do.
He had great answers for everything I threw at him. So it was obvious to me that background wasn't really his issue.
Matt was telling me was having a hard time with dialog, so I sent him a snippet of some dialog I had been working on that evening.
Let me just take a second to highlight that last point a bit. I sent him a snippet... of my book... that no one else has ever seen snippets of before...
I jokingly told him to feel special all the while I was sitting on the edge of my seat to see what he might have to say about what I wrote.
Here I was trying to help him with dialog and he could be reading mine thinking, this is worse than mine, she can't help me!
Matt was uncharacteristically quite for a minute or two, I started chewing on my nails. He did respond back but he just continued along with the conversation without mentioning my snippet!
We were doing all this over a chat so its very possible that he was in his own manuscript when I typed that to him and he just missed it. My brain, however, jumped right to the worst case scenario. He must be thinking it is awful.
I took a deep calming breath and reminded myself that tonight was not about me. I was determined to get his butt back in the writing chair if I had to drive over to his house and tie him to it.
We continued on back and forth for a bit longer when I finally said, ok just send me something, show me something you think is just utter crap and I will tell you what I think.
Matt and I have been friends for quite some time, we were once co-workers and we have collaborated on many, many projects in the past. It takes an insane amount of courage to send someone a chunk of your work if you love it, much more so if you hate it. I want to say that I was honored that Matt felt comfortable enough to show me something he felt was so horrible it made him want to stop writing all together.
He sent me about 4 pages of typed material via drop box and I set off to read it.
After a few (very intense for Matt, I'm sure) minutes I came back to tell him what I thought. I told him what I truly felt about it. I didn't think he was far off from the story he wanted to tell.
I think I surprised him. They say writers are their own worst critics and I think that was true for Matt. It's probably true for me too but we'll see.
I'm not a big sci-fi reader but I do enjoy them from time to time. I really enjoyed what I had read, I was able to follow all the sci-fi stuff because the context was well done and I genuinely wanted to know what happened to this guy after the scene I was given came to a close. That's hard to do in just a few paragraphs.
Matt had prefaced the whole thing with what he felt was wrong with it. His character feels like he isn't having enough of a reaction to the news he is given and the dialog felt, for lack of a better word, stiff.
I thought his character was having a reaction, but I could see what Matt was talking about. He wanted him to have a more intense reaction.
With Matt's permission I added about 20 words to a few paragraphs of his work and showed him with a few tweaks you can convey to the reader a more intense reaction without rewriting the entire conversation.
I think he liked what I had to show him, it also proved to him that he really wasn't that far away.
All this led to a conversation about the Show Don't Tell Rule in writing. Which is all I ended up adding when I threw in a few extra words.
This made me feel empowered to show Matt another snippet from my own writing where I am writing about my own character's reaction to something someone else said to her.
This time Matt did comment on it and he liked it, he really, really liked it!
His praise on my 2 small paragraph snippet sent me over the moon!
The whole conversation was just about an hour and I think it left us both feeling pretty jazzed up to do some more writing. In my opinion if that session did nothing more than motivate my friend, it was an hour well spent.
Matt, thanks for having a working session with me. We should be having those check ins every so often. Also thanks for letting me devote an entire blog entry to you and our conversation. If you're up for it, talk about what you've been up to since that night in the comments.
I have been promised that I will get to read his story when he's done! Yay, I can't wait!!!!
Monday, April 1, 2013
Blogging is Hard and 750 Words a Day
Every week my blogging task is becoming harder and harder. I think I'm in a good steady state with my writing and I feel like I don't have a lot of new stuff to talk about... yet.
I like writing this blog because its good practice, it keeps me on a schedule, it forces me to come up with a new topic every week and because my adoring fans would be devastated if I missed the opportunity to blog... you know, both of 'em.
Last week I talked about how much my reading impacts my ability to write. I am happy to say that I am back into the reading swing of things and almost finished with a book in which I spent more than 2 months on page 50.
In addition to reading again, I set out with another plan of attack. I had set aside one night a week for writing. For me it was usually Wednesday nights. The entire night was devoted to writing and I did nothing else from the time my kids were in bed to the time I went to bed.
Of course there were a few problems with that. First, I was spending about the first 45 minutes to an hour going back over what I had written the week before to maintain my consistency. I didn't want my character to draw her bow in the scene I wrote tonight if she had already drawn her bow and was holding it in the week before.
The second issue I was having was that I felt like I was giving up all the other stuff I wanted to do just to write. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to sacrifice everything else I love doing in my free Mommy time. I thought back to a conversation a friend and I had about writing. He mentioned to me that he tried to stick to the 750 words a day challenge. So I decided to a little research.
Really the 750 words a day challenge is to get the juices flowing in the morning so you're ready for a day of writing awesomeness. But it can be used just to motivate people to getting some writing done everyday.
Since I don't have the luxury of getting to write as my full time job I thought maybe I can write 750 words a day in my book. I tested myself and 750 words took me about 45 minutes on a bad day. So many shoes on Facebook....
So I decided to commit myself to spending at least one hour every evening I am home to writing. Monday nights is for the blog and a girl has to get her floor hockey games in, but that leaves plenty of other nights in the week.
By doing it this way I found that I actually spend more time during the week writing, and I get a lot more down on paper. I'm also never going more than 2 days since the last time I wrote, so maintaining my continuity is a lot easier as well. I read the last few sentences and I'm off and running. The last thing I found is that since it really only takes me an hour to accomplish this goal, I get the writing done, then it's off to read my book or catch up on those TV shows I can't seem to break away from. I also feel less guilty when I need a night off and decide not to write because I'm only taking a extra day off, not a whole week. That was a slippery slope to never finishing my book.
So this decision has really worked out for me and hopefully it will help me get the manuscript finished up that much faster. I'm sure editing is going to a whole new adventure all its own!
On a side note, I have been hearing a lot from you guys in person or in other messages that you're enjoying the blog. The happiness I feel when I hear these things cannot be described in words. Please keep the comments and chats coming! It's really inspiring and motivating to hear what you guys have to say. I'm even more impressed that so many of you expressed interest in reading the book once its finished! I love talking about what I'm trying to do, this blog, and even your own writing experiences. I'm a very social learner and I love to hear what you've gone through. I am learning from people everyday and maybe I might be able to help you out as well!
Thanks so much for reading. :-)
I like writing this blog because its good practice, it keeps me on a schedule, it forces me to come up with a new topic every week and because my adoring fans would be devastated if I missed the opportunity to blog... you know, both of 'em.
Last week I talked about how much my reading impacts my ability to write. I am happy to say that I am back into the reading swing of things and almost finished with a book in which I spent more than 2 months on page 50.
In addition to reading again, I set out with another plan of attack. I had set aside one night a week for writing. For me it was usually Wednesday nights. The entire night was devoted to writing and I did nothing else from the time my kids were in bed to the time I went to bed.
Of course there were a few problems with that. First, I was spending about the first 45 minutes to an hour going back over what I had written the week before to maintain my consistency. I didn't want my character to draw her bow in the scene I wrote tonight if she had already drawn her bow and was holding it in the week before.
The second issue I was having was that I felt like I was giving up all the other stuff I wanted to do just to write. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to sacrifice everything else I love doing in my free Mommy time. I thought back to a conversation a friend and I had about writing. He mentioned to me that he tried to stick to the 750 words a day challenge. So I decided to a little research.
Really the 750 words a day challenge is to get the juices flowing in the morning so you're ready for a day of writing awesomeness. But it can be used just to motivate people to getting some writing done everyday.
Since I don't have the luxury of getting to write as my full time job I thought maybe I can write 750 words a day in my book. I tested myself and 750 words took me about 45 minutes on a bad day. So many shoes on Facebook....
So I decided to commit myself to spending at least one hour every evening I am home to writing. Monday nights is for the blog and a girl has to get her floor hockey games in, but that leaves plenty of other nights in the week.
By doing it this way I found that I actually spend more time during the week writing, and I get a lot more down on paper. I'm also never going more than 2 days since the last time I wrote, so maintaining my continuity is a lot easier as well. I read the last few sentences and I'm off and running. The last thing I found is that since it really only takes me an hour to accomplish this goal, I get the writing done, then it's off to read my book or catch up on those TV shows I can't seem to break away from. I also feel less guilty when I need a night off and decide not to write because I'm only taking a extra day off, not a whole week. That was a slippery slope to never finishing my book.
So this decision has really worked out for me and hopefully it will help me get the manuscript finished up that much faster. I'm sure editing is going to a whole new adventure all its own!
On a side note, I have been hearing a lot from you guys in person or in other messages that you're enjoying the blog. The happiness I feel when I hear these things cannot be described in words. Please keep the comments and chats coming! It's really inspiring and motivating to hear what you guys have to say. I'm even more impressed that so many of you expressed interest in reading the book once its finished! I love talking about what I'm trying to do, this blog, and even your own writing experiences. I'm a very social learner and I love to hear what you've gone through. I am learning from people everyday and maybe I might be able to help you out as well!
Thanks so much for reading. :-)
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