Tag: productivity

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Occasional Boost

Pavowski2 Comments

Know what has two thumbs and had a thousand-word day yesterday?

This guy.

I sort of hate to spend time talking about a productive writing day or writing in any way about my daily word count. Such things are interesting only to a really tiny sliver of whatever readership my blarg might have. (Maybe only to me!) But it feels like an accomplishment, and I’ve become a real firm believer in claiming your accomplishments of late (after all, if you don’t crow about the things you’ve done, who’s going to do it for you?).

1000 words in a session might not seem like a lot, and in fact, it might objectively not be a lot. Browse some writers’ sites on the net and you’ll see that lots of them like to get in 2000 words before breakfast. Which is well and good for them. But a lot of them are paid writers, which I am not (yet), and several of them are even full-time writers, which I am definitely not (yet). Which means they have the time in their day to devote to such things.

Me, I’ve been subsisting on about 500 words a day over the past few months working on my current novel. That, hacked out in thirty-minute sessions at the beginning of my work morning before the day properly gets started. It ain’t much, but those 500 words are mine, and I defend them pretty stridently, even if the force I’m most often defending them from is myself. There are always other things I could be doing, maybe even should be doing, with those thirty minutes. But I also know that a week of 500 words a day turns into 2500 words a week. And a month of 2500 words a week turns into 10,000 words a month. And the math from there is pretty easy: 10,000 words a month turns into a full 80-90,000 word novel in eight or nine months, and I’m pretty much on schedule for that, notwithstanding the loss of about twenty thousand words a month or so ago.

So needless to say, a 1000-word day is a not-insignificant drop in the not-insignificant bucket.

(Oh yeah, after my 1000 word session, I was a good little soldier and backed up my work. Won’t be making that mistake again.)

Even still, consistent or not, the 500 words a day still feels like a struggle a lot of mornings. More than a few mornings a week, I spend about half of that time staring at the screen, wondering just what the hell these characters are supposed to be doing, just how the hell they’re going to solve the dilemmas they’ve found themselves in, just where the hell the whole crazy train is going.

But every once in a while, I don’t struggle.

Every once in a while, the right idea floats past my neurons, makes its way down to my fingertips and crackles like static lightning out onto the page.

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When that happens, the whole “writing” thing feels less like creating a story and more like transcribing it; less like building the thing from scratch and spare parts and more like just watching it happen and making a record of it.

And in that way, you get a thousand-word morning in the same space of time that it usually takes to get a five hundred-word morning.

Of course, there are caveats. Most of these words are probably crap, and will need massive rewrites when it’s time to revise. I have a sneaking suspicion that the big mini-climax I’m writing now, coming in at the 2/3 point of the novel, actually belongs at the 1/3 point of the novel, with much of the first third of the novel going on the scrap heap.

But those, as I like to say, are problems for future me.

Right now, the novel is alive and kicking. The 500-word days pave the way for the occasional 1000-word day, and the 1000-word days keep me motivated to keep pushing the thing forward.

Even if “forward” carries it right off the edge of a cliff.

Whee!

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Project Update

Pavowski3 Comments

I can’t write about the thing I really want to write about. I can’t. Dammit!

I just can’t. It’s too close to home. Fargo. That’s okay. There are other things.

So instead, I’ll share with you something I haven’t done in quite some time. Here, then, is my favorite passage from today’s writing session:

“Just go away.”
An ordinary little sister might climb up on the mattress and bounce on him to frustrate him. Rip the covers off and throw the blinds open. Maybe dump a cup of ice water on him as he lies there. But Kitty is never so subtle. She lifts the entire bed and shakes Linc out of it, like a chef sliding an omelet out of the pan. He thumps to the ground, clutching at the blankets and pulling them close around him, but she rips them away with enough force to spin him around on his rear end.

So I’m not 100% on the names as yet, but I’m 110% on the dynamic between the two of these characters. (That’s a lie. I’m never 110% on anything, because YOU CAN’T BE 110% ON ANYTHING. 100% is the max. People who say otherwise need to go back to … sharknado, I dunno, 4th grade math, or whenever you learn percentages. I’m especially talking to you, high school coaches of EVERY SPORT.)

Did I mention that the new project features superheroes? The new project features superheroes. AND SUPER VILLAINS. Especially villains.

Anyway.

I got 1200 words done today, which is a pretty good yield for a one hour session. I only crank out that kind of word count when I’m really feeling the idea, and today, well, I was feeling it. I’m about 13,000 words into the current project and it’s finally catching its wind and moving under its own momentum. Which is actually kind of late, actually — things should probably get crackling way before that — but that’s what the first draft is for, innit?

You can always fix it in the edits.

1200 words. A solid workout. A trip to the pool with the kids. A storm that threatened but never materialized. None of the kids barfed or shat on me today. Stayed on top of the dirty dishes.

Sometimes, all you can hope for are the small things.

Happy Tuesday!

 

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Mind Over Mind

Pavowski7 Comments

I was sitting at work the other day, having just come back from one of several “important” meetings during my planning time, lamenting my general loss of productivity of late. It’s been an adjustment, getting back into the school routine: waking up earlier to get in my runs and workouts, bundling the sprouts off to germcare (sorry, daycare), putting in my time at school, coming home exhausted but still having to cook dinner and wind the sprouts down for the evening, and finally collapsing in a boneless heap to hope that the kids sleep through the night (they’re both in a bit of a midnight waking sort of phase right now, which is a real bummer).

As a result, I’ve lost some momentum on my writing front. I’ve dropped from writing about 800 words a day on my current WIP to 600 or so, and I’m down from five postings a week here at the blarg to three or four if I’m lucky. Which is frustrating. Toward the end of the school year, I was priding myself on those statistics.

Then again, when I think back on it, my workouts were suffering during that time. I was gaining momentum in one area at the expense of the other.

And then further still, I think back to the beginning of summer, when the routine of the workday disappeared and I fell into a funk and wasn’t accomplishing my workouts or the writing I wanted to. I did some, sure, but I just felt so wiped, so burnt out, so unmotivated. Did I need a bit of time to recuperate from the end of the school year? Probably. Did it merit the amount of down time that I took? Meh… I have a hard time justifying that.

And then, my brain flashed back to my time in college. This is a thing I tend to try to stop my brain from doing, because the results are rarely good. I loved my college days, but man oh man were some poor decisions made. And needless to say, the brain doesn’t flash back to the good things when it senses I need a good kick in the arse. No, it flashed back to a stretch of about a year and a half where I did little more than sit in my room and play video games for hours and even days on end. I failed a class, something I’d never done in my life. My other grades tanked. I packed on about fifteen pounds. I turned into a big old jerk (well, even more than normal). Why? I just lost the drive. I felt worthless so I was worthless. And in the depths of that toxic fog, a good friend of mine (who was somehow still my friend despite all my atmospheric jerkitude) came to me with a bit of advice: “The more you do, the more you can do.”

I don’t know if she plagiarized that, and I don’t care. Because it’s true. The mind is a weird organ. It believes what it wants to believe, often contrary to the empirical evidence all around it. That little aphorism led me to get back into my classes and write the first drafts of the play that would grow into Accidentally Inspired, the work that in no small way set the course for the next chapters of my life, and is still setting the course for me.

The more you do, the more you can do.

Momentum matters.

You pick yourself up out of the funk and do something — anything — take a walk around the block, scribble a few bits of dialogue on the page, bang out a few push-ups, chase your kid around the room a few times — and there’s pushback, sure. Your negative momentum holds you in place. But your brain also says to itself, “hey, that wasn’t so bad, we can do that again.” And if you’re smart, you do, and you do a little more next time.

If the me who heard my friend drop that little truth-bomb on me back in college could see what I’m up to these days — even in my current, slightly diminished and frustrated state — he’d have a heart attack. Married, two kids, full-time job, coaching soccer after school, working out five or six times a week, writing novels and short stories like it’s my job, operating a website… The me of the past didn’t believe he could do all that, so of course, he couldn’t. But little by little, he started to believe. Little by little, momentum grew. Little by little, his mind changed.

Were there setbacks along the way? No doubt. The road is neither straight nor level. But by taking on a little more at a time, slowly upping the ante, slowly turning up the burners, I was able to trick myself into becoming moderately productive.

Which reminds me, it’s time to take the kids out on a walk, and then come back and write…

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This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

There’s Productivity, and then there’s Productivity

Pavowski8 Comments

Momentum matters.

The things you’ve been doing are the things you are going to keep doing until you make a concerted effort to stop doing them. The things you haven’t been doing are the things you will continue to not do until you force yourself to do them.

That being said, I am having doubts lately as to the quality of the things I’m doing in regards to my writing.

I’m guest-posting at LindaGHill’s blog, which is kind of a cool thing … not entirely unlike giving a fifteen-year-old the keys to a… god, I was going to say a Lamborghini but that’s not the hotness in cars anymore, is it? (God, it sucks getting older. Did you know that Friends is now showing reruns on Nick at Nite?) Anyway, I made a post there introducing myself and I mentioned all the writing I’ve gotten done this year and it got me thinking.

Because for all this capital-W “Writing” I’ve been doing this year, I’ve done more than my fair share of drooling nonsense onto the virtual pages of this blarg. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably got almost half as many words again here on the blarg as I’ve committed to the novel. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — word count on the novel has slowed necessarily from almost 1200 words daily to about 100 (I’m editing, so some in, some out), and I can probably say that my active time working on the novel has declined from roughly an hour daily to more like thirty or forty-five minutes (editing feels so much more mentally taxing than drafting). I could be way off, but it feels like I’m not working on it nearly as much as when I was drafting. Meanwhile, the word vomit I’ve done here on the blarg has remained more or less constant.

Which is okay. I’m not complaining, because even when I’m not working on the novel, I’m kicking ideas around in my head, thinking about how changes would play out, about passages that need moving and restructuring, and dreaming up ways to break the story even more than I already have (and currently, it’s in more pieces than the wineglass I dropped the other night… not that that particular incident is in any way related to my novel, I promise).

But there’s the rub. Can I qualify “thinking time” as “working” with my novel? Can I justify a day wherein I didn’t actually sit down in front of my manuscript at all? If I wrote a blarg post on a day that I didn’t Write, was I still productive?

I want to say yes, because I’ve thought from the beginning that this blarg was as much an active piece of my Writing as a distraction from it: equal parts sharpening stone and shunting circuit (heh heh… shunt). From the beginning I’ve used my drivel in this space to puzzle through problems with characters, plot holes, scenarios and obstacles, and in a fair few of those situations I’ve actually found some new inspiration just from talking to myself for a while. But I’d be lying if I said that this page didn’t serve the equally important function of distracting me from The Project. Blarging about tv shows or books or shiny new things or toddlers or running or whatever else is front-of-mind on a given day is the pressure release valve on my overtaxed water heater. It’s low-stakes (if not no-stakes) relaxed musing that takes me away from the self-imposed pressure to produce quality work for the novel.

But is it productive?

On the one hand, I’m of a similar mind on writing as I am on running. Some runners who run exceptionally long distances or blistering fast paces refer to practice runs without a specific distance or pace goal as “junk miles”: miles that you get in just because you need to, because your training plan calls for them. But even when I was running more than 20 miles a week I couldn’t think of my runs that way. Every day I get out there feels like a victory, even if I’m hobbled and can only run a quarter of a mile from the house before I limp back. Every run is a good run. Likewise, every word written is a good word, even if it’s a horrible word, like “moist”. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every detour into excessively long lists to pad my word count sharpens the knife that little bit more. It’s all practice. Every step on the path teaches me how to step properly in the future, and every misstep reminds me to watch out for wonky rocks and tangling roots.

Then again, there’s the inescapable truth that time spent writing on the blarg is time not spent working on the novel, and time not spent working on the novel feels a little bit like wasted time. I waited long enough in my life to even leave the station on this little excursion; it feels sacrilegious to put it off any more than I have to.

Often at the end of one of these rambles, I come to find out that I really felt a certain way about the issue in question, I simply didn’t know it before I put it in words. That’s not the case here. I really enjoy the writing I do on the blarg–I’m even proud of it at times–but it’s a poor substitute for working on the novel. Then again, the unemotional side of my brain says, better junk writing than no writing at all. All that considered, there’s no denying that I do feel a sort of accomplishment after writing anything including a pointless blarg rumination, even if that something is just a rant about baby poop.

If anything, then, I guess it comes down to two kinds of productivity. Productive productivity (genuinely gets something done that needs doing) and Hedonistic productivity (feels productive but isn’t, or gets something done that doesn’t necessarily need doing). I used to read a lot of articles on Lifehacker, which is a sort of mecca for all things productivity- and efficiency-related, and there is a tendency for some of the techniques and products discussed over there to be more about cleverness than actual usefulness, placing them squarely in the latter category: the Hedonistically productive. There comes a point where the things we do become more about feeling clever, good, productive, or useful than actually being clever, good, productive, or useful. I think this blarg toes the line. One way or another, though, it’s hard to picture my writing process without the blarg, so I guess I’m stuck with it.

And so are you, if you’ve stuck with me this far.