This has been a year of change. February, my status at work changed to full-time. It's been ten years since I've been full-time at a job. March, my inlaws, who had been living with us for 3-1/2 years, moved to their own place. May, FrenkelFail happened. July, my gall bladder was removed because they found a gallstone.
It is now October, and I can almost say the dust as settled. I know there are a couple of other things that are coming down the pike, but I'll wait until they appear before I mention it. Right now, I want to write about how my writing life adjusted (and trust me, it was a huge adjustment.)
I did a guest blog over at Sarah Hans's website (and yeah, it's been so busy, I'm just now getting around to mentioning it). In it, I mentioned that I started getting up at 5:30am to write. Yeah, that didn't last long. Turns out, I'm really not a morning person. I was only able to do it for two weeks before deciding I really, really like getting my sleep in the mornings. And when I did try to write, I would write well for about 15 minutes or so, run out of steam, then sit there staring blankly for the rest of the hour or so, writing whenever something came to mind.
Come to think of it, that was how I wrote. Period.
A couple of years ago, I was chatting with Sarah Monette about her writing process. Her method was to leave a story project open on her computer and work on it in bits and pieces throughout the day. At the time, I thought it was a slow process. After all, there are many creatives who say to schedule at least an hour to work on a project. Writing in shorter increments won't work because it takes you 15 minutes to warm up and get into your stride and then by the time you are all warmed up, stopping kills the flow.
But...as I thought about it...that's how I was if I was working with a time crunch deadline. When I don't have that, or if I'm brainstorming, or revising? It doesn't take an hour and a half. Before, I would sit at my desk for an hour, slowly going through the text line by line. If I wrote in shorter time chunks, how would that work? How could I arrange things so I could write in shorter bursts? What I needed was more than just adjusting to writing in a shorter time period. I needed to change my entire writing process.
In a sense, it's like going back to basics with Barbara DeMarco's book: "Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within". In it, she suggested to set aside 15 minutes to work on writing. I can find at least 15 minutes during the day. Can I write during my morning break at work? In 15 minutes, I sure can. What about lunch? 15 minutes there? Afternoon break? 15 minutes At home? another 15 minutes. Hey, that's an hour right there.
Now that I'm writing now at odd times, I needed something that I could have accessible at any moment, at any time, where I could jot down thoughts and lines and words as they came to me throughout the day. Something so accessible, I could use it even when I didn't have access to internet. Get ready, because this will blow your mind.
Ordinary pen and paper. Who'd thunk, RIGHT?
Having a physical notebook means that I can write anywhere, anytime. Which, if I'm brainstorming or jotting notes or playing with sentences, it's awesome. I can be thinking about my work, honing it in my head, then jot a few phrases down. Get enough of those, and I got me a working draft.
Revisions are a little trickier. It's easier for me to edit drafts on the computer, therefore I needed a way to do it so I can access those drafts anytime, anywhere. This meant changing the place where I stored my work from my local computer to the cloud. Currently I'm using Dropbox, and it's nice. I still back up to local though, because backups are good.
This also meant I could no longer bounce between three programs: Writer's Cafe, Word and Scrivener. I had to stick with something that could contain all my work and notes and word processing in one place, that I could access from anywhere.
I loved Writer's Cafe. I really, really did.
I even wrote a blog post comparing the two programs, saying I couldn't give up Writer's Cafe even though Scrivener was the better choice. Well, that changed this summer. Scrivener was overwhelmingly better in keeping all my notes, drafts, storyboards, annotations and working drafts in one spot. And as I used Scrivener, I began to discover new ways to keep my writing on track: utilizing the outliner, working with meta-data. You know the best feature I'm loving right now? Color-coding the annotations in my drafts to show what needed to be done in the texts. A sort of to-do list, if you will. Parts I need to brainstorm are in blue, sentence rewrites in white, facts to research in orange--even if I'm not actively writing, I can open Scrivener, choose a color, and work on those in bits and pieces throughout the day. Then, when I'm done, I delete the note. It's nice to see all those notes and comments vanish as the story firms up.
Sorry, Writer's Cafe, but from now on, I'll have to go with Scrivener.
So that was my summer--figuring out Scrivener and the new writing process. Write in bits and pieces, get them into Scrivener. Expand. Set myself a limit of 500 words. (Oh, yes! Scrivener is awesome for setting daily writing goals). Work on the text in bits and pieces. And, if needed, use a couple of vacation days as writing retreat days, go to a coffee house and write like mad all day.
All of this to say, October 1, I finished the first draft of a new 6000 word story. I didn't think I would have time to do that, and I'm quite pleased with it. I've also been working on Willow (because oh gosh, that never ends), and now that I have everything in Scrivener, I find working on it much MUCH easier.
I may have lost time with the expansion of the day job, but nowadays, I've been feeling way more productive than the past three 1/2 years. We'll see how things go.
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