Crafting Fiction

Hey folks,

So, I have to apologize here real quick. Because one of the intentions I had for this space when I was initially working on coming back, was to fill it with far more examples of my creative writing, instead of just putting out a bunch of random crap-posts about whatever is on my mind…but things have just gotten far too busy in my life to actually sit down and have some fun with the writing, instead of just crapping out whatever is on the top of my mind.

And that sucks for both of us.

My plan is to correct this in the near future. I’ve worked on trying to rearrange my schedule a bit better so I can fit in some more fun writing, but for right now, it’s just not going to happen.

But I do have a strategy. One I’m hoping will work. One that’s worked before anyways. I’ve reinstituted my 1000 word per day quota. It’s the method by which I wrote my first book (and several of the following books). It’s the method sworn to by such folks you might have heard of as Stephen King. And, well, it means that I’m actually forced to do some writing. At least, I hope so.

My thought here is that, I have this giant list of items that I’ve been slowly working through writing. A pile of ideas of things that I want to all write at the same time. And so, on my task planner that I use for keeping me productive throughout the day, I have had this ever-growing list of things to write, which I’ve been just pushing the snooze button on because it all felt so absolutely overwhelming.

And so, now I’ve replaced all of those items with one simple one, which amounts to simply: Write 1000 words.

While that giant list of things I want to write is still there, my hope is that by decreasing the visible daily expectation of “Write all these things” down to “Write something” will help to make me actually get some writing done, instead of simply looking at the overwhelming list and deciding to throw up my hands in frustration over how little time I have to do it all.

Writing, for a long time, was easy. I had my set time in my schedule where I could just sit down and go to town with the keyboard. And I would often find myself writing at least 5000 words a day on multiple different projects, while also editing other projects and, well, really, I spent a lot of time just crafting fiction. I’m unfortunately not at that place right now. I simply don’t have the time. But…I still want to write. I just need to make sure I do it when I have the time in my schedule, instead of getting scared about not being able to write everything I have on my list.

And so, I’m trying to trick my brain. Here’s hoping it doesn’t wake up enough today to figure that out, because I’m pretty darn eager to get started on some writing.