A Startlingly Well-Earned Bout of PS2
My brief vacation certainly seems to have invigorated me. In the last couple days I have...
* Finished another job application.
* Sent back out into the world a couple recently returned manuscripts
* Finished and sent out a story that's been hanging around
* Completed various little household chores
* Done enough work that I actually felt justified yesterday in playing video games for 1.5 hrs
I have been so productive that it's gotten around to the point where I'm soon going to have to get back on the "new writing" horse, without the crutch of endless revision to keep me going. This is, the constant anxieties about writing aside, quite the boon. I want to try two "new" writing tricks and see how they fly.
Trick the First: Complete a short story, from zero to final draft, in a week. This will pressure me, hopefully in a good way, and it will give me the chance to see whether I can be satisfied with my own work in that amount of time.
Trick the Second: Write the first draft of a short story, then put it away completely for six weeks. This will hopefully allow me to see and fix big problems before I worry too much about the language. I am prone to worry away at the details so much that by the time I've finished polishing, I have a hard time imagining the story's structure being other than what it is. This has sometimes made revision difficult.
* Finished another job application.
* Sent back out into the world a couple recently returned manuscripts
* Finished and sent out a story that's been hanging around
* Completed various little household chores
* Done enough work that I actually felt justified yesterday in playing video games for 1.5 hrs
I have been so productive that it's gotten around to the point where I'm soon going to have to get back on the "new writing" horse, without the crutch of endless revision to keep me going. This is, the constant anxieties about writing aside, quite the boon. I want to try two "new" writing tricks and see how they fly.
Trick the First: Complete a short story, from zero to final draft, in a week. This will pressure me, hopefully in a good way, and it will give me the chance to see whether I can be satisfied with my own work in that amount of time.
Trick the Second: Write the first draft of a short story, then put it away completely for six weeks. This will hopefully allow me to see and fix big problems before I worry too much about the language. I am prone to worry away at the details so much that by the time I've finished polishing, I have a hard time imagining the story's structure being other than what it is. This has sometimes made revision difficult.