Na Po Wri Mo: Lessons Learned

[krinndnz]

Numbers
Total November word count: 21796. Stories begun: 18. Stories posted: 11. Stories that reached endings: 8.

What did I learn?

• I'm rather more squeamish than I thought about writing smut, especially for weirdsex. That bothers me because it contradicts my self-image.
• 1,000 words a day only works as an average - the stories that I was happy

Comments

[paka]

I'm rather more squeamish than I thought about writing smut, especially for weirdsex. That bothers me because it contradicts my self-image.

I think there's more to look at than that. When you're doing online scening, you have at least one other person's enthusiasm and creativity to ping off of - compare to The open call for suggestions, on the other hand, was a great idea - but going it alone is a lot more dredging confidence, creativity and motivation all up out of yourself. And that's before getting into the technical aspect of "how do I write this and have it be communicative, readable, and interesting language use enough." I don't think anyone would fault you for getting cold feet faced with all of that.

[ribbin]

What paka said. It's always much harder to create fiction from a vacuum.

Also, look at your audience. If you're used to posting things to topic-specific venues, then odds are the audience is going to be into that specific topic. Post it in a mixed venue like LJ, and you have no idea what your reaction will be. Believe you me, as a writer and a writing tutor, I tell you now that 40% of good writing is confidence. The other 60% are education, natural skill, word skill, how many languages the author speaks, how edited it is, how much time there is, how much coffee/beer/speed the writer consumes, outside help, convenience of writing, inspiration, etc, etc, etc.

As a teacher once told me- nobody tells their students to go home and play clarinet brilliantly. They tell them to go home and practice playing the clarinet. So I'm not going to tell you to got home and write something brilliant. Go home and practice writing.

[krinndnz]

Yeah, the Butt In Chair method is still pretty much the most reliable way to get writing done.

I have some-but-not-quite-enough confidence. I know that once I sit down and commit, that once I've been writing, I can get into that zone where it feels like I could keep going indefinitely. Which is nice.

Thanks for the encouragement - I hope you liked the parts that you saw.

[paka]

A friend of mine has really been into the concept of "flow" proposed by Mihaly Czikszentmihaly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) is more about this, and I think it really is a good model of "being in the groove" as far as writing.

In my own experience with visual art, I'm rarely "on" enough to plonk down and work up something big and have it rock immediately. It does happen, but it's not frequent. Drawing badly enough that I need to move to a different page or just rework things a lot is a warm-up for me, equivalent to stretching or meditation before doing any martial art. So I think this is part of what you're noticing - the first ten minutes of writing aren't good before you actually get more into the feel of what you're doing - but I'm not sure how a writer could kind of push this one as intentional warm-up exercise.

[krinndnz]

Huh. The Czikszentmihaly book has actually been on my Amazon wishlist for a while, and insh'allah it'll show up some time. I definitely feel like that, yeah. It takes me a while to get writing. As for warming up, that's part of what things like Write Or Die are for.

[krinndnz]

Okay, that's a helpful angle to consider. Thanks.