(no subject)
Today I read that Malcolm Gladwell thinks that you need 10,000 hours of practice at something to master it. I'm totally not there with writing yet, but I know I'm on to something from the encouragement I get in advanced workshop. My professor isn't doing anything un-orthodox. We're going by the John Gardner school, and I've read both of his books. It's easy to make great comments with that background, and I try my best to be concise. There's another student in class who learns by speaking, and so he repeats what I say often enough that I know that I rub off on the other students. I try to give good comments, and I'm reading their stories after this entry.
The prof calls me Joseph, which throws me. My girlfriend and my family do that. I thrive on praise and the prof knows it. He's giving it to me because it's the easiest way to keep me from being a huge pain in the ass. If I have established anything at this school, it's that I'm a huge pain in the ass. Maybe I'm just being managed. My priorities are screwed up because I care whether that's happening or not. I need to write more, and more regularly.
I've been writing for more than ten years now. I wrote a one-pager in kindergarten about a ghost named Willie. My mom still has that page in a chest, but it's not the first one where I lived the fictive dream as I composed something.
Brian Jacques just died. The first short story that I remember crafting was a piece of Redwall fan fiction. I wrote that Redwall story on lined notebook paper that I kept clipped to a translucent neon green clipboard I'd drawn on the back of with whiteout. I remember it well for obvious reasons; I can still remember the smell, shape, and size of the crap my cat left on that story. I threw the clipboard out without reservation.
That's one of the many obstacles you have to overcome as a writer--you have to be able to discard things you've slaved over, and I had that down when I was 13. I've done that with my progress on my novel thus far. I'm restarting the whole process and writing it chapter by chapter, as a series of short stories. What I need now is the confidence to complete something, and it can't come solely from external praise. I've finished a few stories, but I wrote them mostly as exercises. It's time to start keeping my work, and in order to do that, I need to start producing it again. This journal entry is a procrastination of that process, but it is comforting. LJ is familiar. I made my first LJ entry (on another account) in 1999. All I have to do is move from here to... there.
The prof calls me Joseph, which throws me. My girlfriend and my family do that. I thrive on praise and the prof knows it. He's giving it to me because it's the easiest way to keep me from being a huge pain in the ass. If I have established anything at this school, it's that I'm a huge pain in the ass. Maybe I'm just being managed. My priorities are screwed up because I care whether that's happening or not. I need to write more, and more regularly.
I've been writing for more than ten years now. I wrote a one-pager in kindergarten about a ghost named Willie. My mom still has that page in a chest, but it's not the first one where I lived the fictive dream as I composed something.
Brian Jacques just died. The first short story that I remember crafting was a piece of Redwall fan fiction. I wrote that Redwall story on lined notebook paper that I kept clipped to a translucent neon green clipboard I'd drawn on the back of with whiteout. I remember it well for obvious reasons; I can still remember the smell, shape, and size of the crap my cat left on that story. I threw the clipboard out without reservation.
That's one of the many obstacles you have to overcome as a writer--you have to be able to discard things you've slaved over, and I had that down when I was 13. I've done that with my progress on my novel thus far. I'm restarting the whole process and writing it chapter by chapter, as a series of short stories. What I need now is the confidence to complete something, and it can't come solely from external praise. I've finished a few stories, but I wrote them mostly as exercises. It's time to start keeping my work, and in order to do that, I need to start producing it again. This journal entry is a procrastination of that process, but it is comforting. LJ is familiar. I made my first LJ entry (on another account) in 1999. All I have to do is move from here to... there.