November 19th 2022 - Staying put

I've added around 700 words to a short story I'm working on this morning. 700 likely terrible words that will need a lot of editing. But 700 words to work with is better than a blank page. I did that in about 40 minutes at my desk. I've been with this story for a while so I can work reasonably quickly with it. I'm currently re-drafting it from a different point of view. I started in first person, switched to third but have moved back to first again and am sticking with that.

I've taken advice from Neil Gaiman (I think it was him) and adopted the approach of when I'm at my desk I can do 1 of 2 things:

1. I can do nothing

2. I can write

Allowing myself to do nothing is a nice way to take the pressure off needing to write. But not allowing anything else also means that writing starts to look like an intriguing idea when I'm bored from doing nothing. I've had success with that idea and now when I do sit down at my desk, I do get work done.

But I think I need to work on staying here longer. I've done 40 minutes of writing. In reality, that's a nice amount but it's not a mega-amount. It's the weekend so I feel like I should be spending hours and hours at my desk. Taking advantage of all this free time. I feel guilty for not doing so. But it's quite exhausting this writing stuff.

I'm going to start setting a stopwatch on my phone (turning the screen off so it doesn't distract me as I work) whenever I sit down at my desk to write. I'll take note of the times and see if I can edge the amount of time I spend writing up little by little. I think I'd feel better if I dedicated hours to writing each day instead of minutes.

40 minutes today. Maybe 41 minutes tomorrow.

November 18th 2022 - 200 in 50 update

So I caught up with my writer friend - he was more successful with the 200 in 50 exercise than me. Though he took a very different approach. He used a random word generator to give him 50 words (swapping in a few connectives to make it easier) and then used those from the start. He ended up with a piece of writing of around 120 words that had a sort of narrative to it. He said it helped to have the perimeters of the words set out from the start. Which I can definitely see as an advantage. We discussed a few ways the exercise could be tackled in its original method and agreed to try again for when we meet next week. See how I get on this time around.

November 17th 2022 - F*** you Saunders

I just finished a great book by George Saunders called 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain'. In it, he shares 7 short stories from select Russian authors: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol and then breaks down how they achieve certain effects or reactions in the reader. I was very impressed and learnt a lot that I can apply to both my reviewing of short fiction and my writing of it.

But, in the appendices, he shares 3 writing exercises. I thought I would select one of them to complete with a writing friend I'm meeting up with tomorrow and it's driving me INSANE. I'm really struggling to do it.

The exercise, we'll call it 200 in 50, involves writing a 200-word story using just 50 words. So for example, if your first sentence is: "She sat in the kitchen where it was coolest" you then have those 9 words to re-use. Once you've written 50 words you cannot use anything else beyond those 50.

I thought that sounded perfectly doable. Turns out it's really f******g hard.

I've not yet found a good way to approach it so it will be interesting to hear how my friend got on tomorrow.