writing and writing and writing and
May. 21st, 2010 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliI try to never stop writing.
I have a quota -- at least 250 words, aka a page -- and a rule that a day's quota can be made up after it passed and indeed must be, but it can't be written in advance.
And I stick to it. Because otherwise I will have long, long, long droughts of writing. From time to time when external events interfere, I find that sometimes the break causes a gush of writing after, but I'm not good at getting myself back to writing after self-chosen breaks.
Alas, I have never quite managed to figure out a good revision quota. Word counts (even if you include antiword counts) make it hard to judge passages that do not need much. Page counts, passages that need deep reworking.
And it's one reason why I have a lot of project going simultaneously. It's dangerous, because it's very easy to go on and on and on and never finish, but I find a lot of stories are like slow-recharging wells. Drain all the water out and it's down to mud, and I won't get up to quota trying to get more water out of that muck. I have to hop off to another well, and circle back to this one when it's recharged.
Even when I finish a project, I don't take a break. If it's early enough, I hop to a new story and go on. Then, it's often not early enough because the story came gushing out with the end in sight and I stayed up way, way, way too late writing. And I try to start new things early, too, because frequently they gush, too, on and on and on, and I write and write and write in hopes of getting as much as it done as possible before I have to try taking up the stuff I wrote the day (week, month) before and weaving it into the stuff I wrote today. It's the middles, really, where the well runs dry -- and so the middle are what I keep circling back to.
I have a quota -- at least 250 words, aka a page -- and a rule that a day's quota can be made up after it passed and indeed must be, but it can't be written in advance.
And I stick to it. Because otherwise I will have long, long, long droughts of writing. From time to time when external events interfere, I find that sometimes the break causes a gush of writing after, but I'm not good at getting myself back to writing after self-chosen breaks.
Alas, I have never quite managed to figure out a good revision quota. Word counts (even if you include antiword counts) make it hard to judge passages that do not need much. Page counts, passages that need deep reworking.
And it's one reason why I have a lot of project going simultaneously. It's dangerous, because it's very easy to go on and on and on and never finish, but I find a lot of stories are like slow-recharging wells. Drain all the water out and it's down to mud, and I won't get up to quota trying to get more water out of that muck. I have to hop off to another well, and circle back to this one when it's recharged.
Even when I finish a project, I don't take a break. If it's early enough, I hop to a new story and go on. Then, it's often not early enough because the story came gushing out with the end in sight and I stayed up way, way, way too late writing. And I try to start new things early, too, because frequently they gush, too, on and on and on, and I write and write and write in hopes of getting as much as it done as possible before I have to try taking up the stuff I wrote the day (week, month) before and weaving it into the stuff I wrote today. It's the middles, really, where the well runs dry -- and so the middle are what I keep circling back to.