So here's the plan: I'll get up an hour earlier every weekday (now would be a good time to start taking bets on how long I can actually stand to keep this up), come to work, and write. The first hour I won't even be on the clock, so that's definitely devoted entirely to the novel. The second hour will be too, job permitting. I'll throw in hour three if I'm on a roll and work is quiet, but really, two hours is about all I can stand to spend working on one thing.
The rest of the morning (again, work permitting) will be devoted to other writing: articles, ads, my other blogs, creative exercises and so on. And the afternoon will be for work stuff--filing and project management and the like...you know, my JOB. I feel I can get away with this because, really, most days I only have about three or four cumulative hours of actual job-related work, spread out over eight hours. Of course, there are also the occasional days where I'm trying to pack about 12 hours worth of work down into 9 or 10 hours, so it all comes out in the wash.
This is the ideal, and I know every day won't go this way. Today, though, is so far so good.
I realized two things over the weekend. One is that, whenever I get stalled on my novel, chances are really great that it's because there's something about it that just isn't working on me, and my subconscious knows it even if I don't, and doesn't want me wasting any more time writing stuff that I won't get to keep. Looking over my manuscript on Saturday, I figured out what it is that's not working for me, and what I need to do to fix it, so, that's pretty awesome right there, and now I can get going again.
The other thing I realized while reading Coffee Shop, and God bless Scalzi for helping me put my finger on exactly WHY the pen and notebook paper approach just doesn't work for me: typing is just too much a part of my process. I think it's because typing is the best chance my actual, physical writing has of keeping up with my thoughts, and that helps me stay focused on what I'm writing; whereas when I try to write creatively longhand, I can't write fast enough. By the time I finish scrawling a word, even illegible shorthand recognizable only to myself, and even then just barely so, I lose my train of thought and have to go back and start over, and I get frustrated and my mind starts to wonder. And hardly anything I write longhand ever ends up getting used, anyway, because when I sit down to type up the scene I wrote, it takes a life of its own and ends up looking nothing like the scene I scribbled out on paper. So it's just a big waste of time, and I'm hereby allowed to cut myself all kinds of slack for not writing when I don't have a computer readily available. And that settles that. Thanks, Scalzi.
So, like I said, I came in early this morning to take full advantage of my work computer and the morning quiet. I didn't actually write so much as get organized by swiping an idea from Dwight and creating a visual representation of my outline in PowerPoint, as pictured:
It's color-coded by plot thread. The lighter shading indicates scenes that either need to be extensively reconsidered and/or rewritten, or have yet to be written. What I love about this is that I can see at a glance how much work I've gotten done versus how much I still have to do. Plus this makes it easy to move stuff around and play with the order without committing to any changes. Excellent. Thanks, Dwight!
Now I'm off to the gym to work off some steam and too much pizza. Hasta, pasta.
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