Skip to main content

Writing.

We decided between the two of us that this summer we would make sure to spend at least a tiny bit of time continuing to work on things we want to improve.

Wulfa wants to improve her Spanish and I want to improve my writing.

So we allocated an hour a day(excepting Sunday's which are craziness) for each of us to be kid free and able to disappear into our room and work on the subject of our choice.

There are some things I've learned from my time doing this.

1) Writing is a lot harder when you don't already have a story in your head. Forcing yourself to work past the "I-don't-want-to"'s is just as painful in writing as it is in exercising or studying. And just as rewarding the next time you do it.

2) There is no such thing as I'll just look at [x] for a minute. If you stop and read or web browse or play a game then you are giving up your entire allotment of time. Focus is key and sticking to it despite the distractions.

3) I don't have long term focus in my writing currently. I'll write a scene(700-1000 words). Or at most two scenes and then I get bored with the story. This is why payment never completed and a big reason why I've never been able to complete a story or even attempt a novel. I have several full stories in my head that I've walked from beginning to ending and none of them have ever been written.

4) Because I see my stories as movies... and it takes a lot of work to portray them in words. I visualize the hero "leaping off the roof into the throne room to decapitate the evil false king" but that is as far as my mind goes. And it takes generally a lot more words to describe that in a readable fashion that doesn't sound like a gamefaq's plot summary. Heck, the scene in payment... that was "dragon guy walked into the ballroom, shoving blustering noble after blustering noble out of his way, approaches the duchess and bows before her servant, swearing fealty to her and saying he is payment for her missing mother". If you read my thousand word post you'll see that the actual scene is much bigger.

5) Authors are way underpaid for the amount of work they have to put into this. Even if they are able to write it all in a month or something nuts like that... their skill is being able to write it/ proof it/let other people not like it and that is a lot harder than most people give credit. Just like engineering is a lot easier than most people make out... both jobs sets require that the apprentice apply him/herself continually and do a lot of boring work so that in the end someone is amazed at it.

So I'm not giving up but I am finding that I will need to polish and buff and scrub a lot more on my skills before I can even say that I write short stories :P. But at least I can say I write eh? Heck, look at Howard Taylor. Compare this and this. See how far he's come? All through continual application of practice. I can only hope for such an improvement 10 years from now.

Comments

Patrick said…
Shhhh...you're not supposed to let out the secret that Engineering isn't as hard as people think it is.

Yeah, sitting down and dedicating time to something you want to improve can be a difficult thing. I don't know how many times I've started practicing piano(usually lasts about a week) before I lose interest. Good luck to ya. Good habits are hard to form.

Popular posts from this blog

RAMBLY Political Responses.

Sub-Teach, On monday, I had about 80% of this written as a reply to your comment before I figured I should just drop it into a post. Yay for thought spam from simple commentary. To be clear: I'm not anti-our-current-president. I didn't like his solution for the recession(the bailout(which was started by our previous president)) but I'm certainly not blaming the recession on him. I understand that it was my dear party that thought you could spend AND cut taxes at the same time. I'm not really in favor of the way in which the other party wants to extend the tax cuts(cutting some and not others). I would rather we let all of the tax cuts expire and everyone equally paid a little bit more. BUT I'm really not happy with the idea that we can extend all of them when we are in record levels of national debt, which is what my party espouses. No our current president didn't have much time to fix the economy...and any good/harm he did probably won't be evident

A post!

So Beowulfa recieved the Burning Crusade as one of her many christmas presents. As a side note, she also recieved a picture of a chick with a pet lion. Sort of like Angharad. Anyways, we're poking Drenai characters in a "ooo that would be cool" kind of way. Since it was her birthday present and all... and if the characters were not BElf or Spacegoat then it wouldn't be using the present! So we're going to at least get them to 10. And BElf's are too... pretty in an ugly way. I don'ts like them. She doesn't like them(much?). I said Spacegoat. She quickly created a male drenai priest(this morning). We talked about it at lunch and she's going to make a paladin instead, I think. I slightly warned her off of priest because I've heard they solo about as well as a warrior heals. I'm.... undecided. We have warrior, paladin, mage, priest, shaman, hunter. I've been told I need to be something tankish. So mage and priest are gone. I'm definin

New Stuff

For those of you who are still following us I'd like to redirect you over to our new blog project, www.wordsremember.com . Damm and I have embarked on artistic and literary adventures and have even opened our own etsy shop which you can find here . Thanks!