A Small Handful of Writing-Related Things

[rsadelle]

I used to think I wasn't neurotic about my writing at all, but since I've been using Twitter and can just blurt out whatever I'm thinking about whatever I'm writing, I've realized I'm much more neurotic than I thought. Anyway, here are a couple of writing-related things I've been thinking about. Tell me how you do things!

Notebooks. I know lakeeffectgirl uses one notebook per story (or used to, anyway), but I do too little writing by hand for that strategy. Also, I currently have four things I'm working on every day (well, six days a week) plus two more miscellaneous stories, so if I walk over to the library to write, I really just want to take one notebook. I end up just making a squiggly line through a blank line between stories.

Always writing. My mom took me on an overnight theater trip last month. We got to the theater really early, and while we were waiting for the show to start, I pulled out a 3x5 card and a pen and jotted down the outline for one of the things I'm working on so I wouldn't forget what was going to happen. My mom said she was impressed that I was always writing (I also spent our half hour of downtime in our hotel room that afternoon writing, while she checked Facebook on her phone, which made me laugh), and that she doesn't always manage to get things down before she forgets about them. (Note: she's a poet, and she also has pens and paper stashed all over the place in her house and purse.) That didn't seem weird to me at all - it's not the first time I've made story notes or written a couple of sentences on a 3x5 card in a theater - but maybe it's not something everyone does.

Tricking my brain 1: word count goals. My current daily word count goal is 200 words per story per day, six days a week. With four things, that only amounts to 800 words per day, and I could write a lot more than that. (And some days I do.) But if my word count goals are too high, I will rebel against them (even though I set them) and just not do them.

Tricking my brain 2: not giving things their own docs. I have a Google Doc titled "Snippets and Such" for tiny snippets. If something I start working on there ends up being long and something I keep working on, it eventually gets its own doc. I said on Twitter the other day that maybe I need a standard for when things get their own docs. lakeeffectgirl said she usually gives things their own docs at 500 words; I often give them docs at about a thousand. I don't want to do it too early, because as long as I'm writing into the snippets doc, I can pretend it's not a real story and I don't feel like I'm cheating on other projects by working on it. (This is also why I sometimes write/plot bunny things over Twitter or straight into email.)

Comments

[lakeeffectgirl.livejournal.com]

At the very least, a notebook has to be all the same fandom, since one story per notebook would be a lot of empty paper. Lately I've been using legal pads, and can rip off what's done once I've typed it up. The only problem is that they're too big to fit in my purse, so I have to remember to take my writing bag with in the morning if I want to go write after work. (But I still have two Moleskines in my purse, and one of them is all notes for hockeyfic.)

[rsadelle]

I remember you posted a picture of ripped out legal pad pages, which made me wonder if you were doing something different now. I keep thinking I should rip out the parts of my notebook I'm done with and make it lighter, since the one I use around town is pretty heavy. (The lighter JoBros one is still my writing notebook for travel.) (Because you need a lot of notes now, right?)

[lakeeffectgirl.livejournal.com]

(Shut uuuuuuuuuuuuup, this notebook is almost all notes/timelines for various things, a large portion of which was for the Switzerland fic. Which somehow still has things wrong with it that I noticed the other day, but I can't worry about it now.)

[rsadelle]

(I approve of notes and timelines! And you have to just let go of those things that were wrong in older things.)