It's been a few months... · 10:08am Jan 23rd, 2016
So, a few months back, I told y'all I had around 13,000 words written across three different projects. I even gave y'all screencaps and everything, 'cause I was so proud of myself.
Since then, aside from the two thousand or so horse story words I've posted on this blog and another thousand posted as a short bandwagon mashup for kicks, I've put together another (approximately) 32,840 horse words. That's well over a third again of all the horse words I've already published, enough to be a novella or even a shorter novel, and an approximate 25% increase in productivity (where "productivity" is defined as "horse words per month"). If measured only by the time since then I've actually spent writing, it's even more. These past two months in particular have been busy in that way.
And yet I've nothing to show for any of it. The closest thing I have to a publishable story is a first draft that I know needs a lot of work.
So I sit here asking myself why. The answer is obvious when you've got access to my unpublished work, of course. Staying on track is apparently not something I have the discipline for. Those 32,840 words are divided among fifteen different stories, a balance of pieces with as many as 9400 words and those with as few as 130.
There are elements of "my standards are above my ability" present, but I have a handle on that now. If some of y'all have exercises you can share that help to build and maintain the ability to focus and write down one idea at a time, I'm all ears.
I feel ya man. It's a problem a lot of writers have. I find that the best way to get through that is to get together with someone, and discuss what the story is and where you want it to go. Doing collage with someone is a great way to get the ideas flowing. * wink *wink.
And as hard as it might be, you have to scrap ideas that you know won't go anywhere.
So basically, you have my approach to writing... on a much bigger scale
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You're not wrong. I've been batting an idea back and forth between myself and a friend for a week or so now, in a collaborative effort that has built a collage of 14ish scenes and a flurry of ideas. That's the one that's spouted over nine thousand (hee) words, and besides a one-shot currently sitting at just under 7500 words and the completed first draft I mentioned, it's one of the stories most likely to see the light of day.
Prioritising truly ought to be a thing...
As horrifying as this will sound, my plethora of desirable projects is the result of pruning away more than half of my ideas. Some got published in my scrapfic (Half-Baked Dreams), and others were simply deleted.
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Neat.
My suggestion for writing a lot is to turn off anything that's not Microsoft Word, keep at least three different pages up and multitask a story, brainstorming, and what you can't do.
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