No really, it's work

[swan_tower]

In all seriousness, one of the trickiest things about writing as a line of work is the part that doesn't look recognizably like work.

I'm currently in progress on a background project, and I've had to accept that as much as I would like to be charging ahead and putting words down on the page, doing that right now stands a high chance of producing material I'll just have to cut later. I need to think. I need to figure out plot beats that will be lively as opposed to merely getting the job done. I need to make sure I intend to stick with my current idea about how magic works in this setting, because I've already tweaked it once, and you know what's not fun? Invalidating a chunk of narrative because things don't work that way anymore.

This is necessary work -- but it is also work that does not lend itself to metrics. It is the opposite of effective for me to set a timer and say, okay, for the next hour I am going to Think About the Book. Nor can I really set a goal where by the end of the week I need to have a clear sense of a particular character and how they'll get involved with the plot. Trying to set that kind of goal is a really, really good way to make my brain freeze up and produce nothing at all.

And even when the ideation does happen . . . at what point am I allowed to kick back and say, okay, done for the day? I can set a baseline for drafting: for me it's usually a minimum number of words, but for other people it's a certain amount of time at the keyboard. Either way, when you hit your goal, you're done. (If you want to or have to be. There are days when I hit that goal and keep going just because I'm on a roll; yesterday was one of those days.) Thinking, though . . . how do I decide that I've made enough intangible progress, and now it's okay for me to slack off and watch TV? And even if the answer is that I should do more work, how do I do that when the best way for me to think is to be doing something else? Only certain kinds of something else count; TV isn't a great one. Neither is reading or playing a game. Showering's great, but we're in a drought here, so I can't just take three a day and see what happens.

I dunno. I've been doing this stuff for years and I still dunno. I have a good plot bit, though -- something that will introduce a bit of action and set up some complications for my protagonist. I still don't know much about one of the characters involved in it, which is bad because they're supposed to be moderately important to this story . . . so I guess I have more thinking to do. Eventually.

Maybe tomorrow, when I'm in the car.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/w2DPPi)

Comments

[mrissa]

Lord yes. So much is geared toward getting the beginner to be able to write anything at all, and so much of that is completely useless at some stages to people for whom "anything at all" is no longer the goal.

[swan_tower]

I don't even know how I would teach/advise on this front. Apart from the usual canards about how our brains often get more creative when we're doing some relatively mindless, repetitious task . . . the whole deal with this stage, at least for me, is that it doesn't respond to structured approaches of the type you can write up into Sage Advice. It's like the discussions Alyc and I have had about why imbuing in the Rook and Rose books doesn't get as much respect as pattern or numinatria: it can't really be taught, only learned.

[mrissa]

I think the most useful thing I can think of is to teach beginners that this stage will be there, and that it will be useful to NOT set up mental traps like "you're lazy if you don't write 2000 words today," because those will start out counterproductive and get EVEN MORE counterproductive.

[swan_tower]

True. Unreasonable expectations at the outset will burn you so hard later -- I found that out the first time I attempted to sit down and write a novel. (One which I never completed and never will, i.e. not Lies and Prophecy.)

[oracne]

I feel this so hard. Currently in the trough of recouping brain after a big project.

[swan_tower]

Oof, yes. Having to convince the Puritan work ethic that downtime between projects is necessary and good = also less than easy.

[pameladean]

David and I shared an office for ten years. I was writing fiction, he was writing software. (Insert obligatory joke.) The number of times when we would BOTH be staring out the window, wandering off to get snacks we didn't need, leaping up to go find a book and leafing feverishly through it, was astonishing.

We did both type a lot too, but that seemed less remarkable.

P.

[swan_tower]

I can't even really do this stage while sitting at the computer. Chewing on what to have happen next in the scene or how to phrase a thing, sure (though I'm actually more liable to wander into the bedroom and lie down, because apparently inspiration likes to live on the ceiling), but the developmental stages of the book as a whole? Those need something else.

[lokifan]

I like cooking or washing up for this; swimming, too. But yeah, none of those look like working/writing!