"Just Write"

[mark_asphodel]

So I didn't make my goal of having Chapter 13 of "Starchild" out by tonight.  Oh, well... there are a number of personal goals I didn't meet this weekend.  Like buying a new vacuum cleaner.

Part of the problem is that a couple of weeks back, I followed a piece of writing advice that I normally avoid like it's poison.

"Just write.  Don't worry about it being good-- you can edit it later.   Just sit down and write."

Well, I did, and now I have a block of textual crap entitled "Chapter 13"-- or did until I excised that entire block of text like a tumor, dumped it into the slot labeled "Chapter 14" in case I needed to refer to it, and started over.  And since I did try to convince myself I could work with said textual crap, I wasted a lot of time with it.  I guess I could argue that the delay allowed me to refine the sequencing of certain events in Chapters 13 and 14, but I'd like to think I could have gotten there without writing junk text as a self-installed roadblock.

I'm sure that advice has its utility for professionals writing to deadline.  But in the case of someone writing for fun, it has always caused me more harm than good.  

-x-

Also, I did take an Eliwood/Fiora detour, but the junk-text issue was already ongoing when I wrote that.

-x-

Also, the squirrels have raided and feasted upon my carefully-planted canna lilies.  Evil little rodents.

Comments

[hooves.livejournal.com]

You clearly need cats. I'd be so pissed if my cannas (which...we dug up and the entire bucket of bulbs DISAPPEARED) were eaten by squirrels.

But never fear, squirrels stay the hell away from our property or they uhh end up with their head in the flower bed and the body by the front door. A gift, from my sister's indoor/outdoor cat. How lovely. At least they aren't creepin' 'round in my walls and chewing on wires. Those bastards are as bad as mice.

Also, the just write thing? Yeah, never, ever worked for me. I could BS stuff but if I REALLY couldn't get in the mood to write something? I'd get a bunch of textual crap myself.

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

At least they aren't creepin' 'round in my walls and chewing on wires.
Back when we had the house, we had squirrels and God only knows what else creeping in the walls, scratching away. And then one day it stopped. I like to think ceiling!Wallace killed them and used them as fertilizer for his potato farm.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

There is an outdoor cat in the neighborhood. He poops on my lawn. My own kitty is indoors-only, for his own sake.

My husband hates cannas. He swears he is not in league with the squirrels, but I think he pays them in walnuts. :/

[hooves.livejournal.com]

LOL

Our indoor/outdoor cat was a housecat that someone abandoned. One day he just strolled on in the house when someone opened the door. Now he's a 20lb fatty who will cry for hours to go in/out/in/out. We keep him in at night because years ago one of our cats was killed by coyotes the one night we didn't let her in. (July 4th so we were out past dark and yeah, we couldn't find her when we came home.)

Cannas are so pretty though. :( He might pay them in walnuts. Or birdseed, even.

Also, what is your kitty's name. You never talk about your kitty (or at least not much).

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

I grew up with cannas and like them. He thinks they're obscene.

My kitty is named LOLO, after the Adventures of LOLO. He is my adorable baby-- I have his picture on my phone, my desktop, etc. He just turned seven and looks a bit like your CiCi except with green eyes.

He likes mirrors.

[samuraiter.livejournal.com]

I recommend the $37 basic Bissell if you need a good vacuum cleaner at a low price. The suction is good, the filters are easy to remove and clean, and the features are all easy to use. Been a great investment for my apartment!

As for the "just write it" approach, it does tend to work strangely well for me. ^_^; No idea why.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec. Actually, I was going to get a Royal Privilege again-- had one before and it was great, plus the local vacuum cleaner shop has good old-school customer service. And they will offer me some trade-in value to recycle this old Hoover, so I can't beat that.

[hooves.livejournal.com]

hissss hissss

booooo

My Dyson is still your Bissell's mortal enemy, Samu!

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

That "just write" advice that practically everyone seems to swear by? Yeah, never worked for me, either. At least not for fiction. It's worked great for essays that I did twelve hours before the due date, but those are essays and I can bullshit my way through those. I can't bullshit through my fanfiction or originals without feeling like it's a cop-out. Although I must say, I started off chapter three of "My Sins" with a random line Marth says at the end of the game (in his talk with Nyna) and then I went through the scene from the end to the beginning (I never work in order it seems). But that's different than writing a text-block of crap. I do that every year--it's called NaNoWriMo. I don't need to do that all the time, you know?

Besides, my inner perfectionist is up my arse until I make it not suck, and sometimes it's just really hard to salvage something from a really bad draft. (My first draft is usually almost always complete rubbish--it's just to get down my ideas in a somewhat coherent manner and that's it. My second draft is where it's at.)

Besides half of the time I just can't think of anything to jot down, and then next thing I know I am finding patterns in Word's background from staring at it so hard.

The thing I usually do when something just isn't working with one fic is I just go on to something else. I have been slowly cranking out that Marth/Merric fic, but whilst I was agonising over chapter three? I finished 90 percent of the fic. I guess it's a form of procrastination, but I have to admit, it helps get the juices flowing.

Squirrels are evil rodents. They're cute and fuzzy to deceive you, and meanwhile they are secretly plotting to kill everything. Back when I used to garden, they liked to, uh, eat everything. That's when I started getting friendly with the local stray cats. That was a particularly smart investment. (There was a squirrel population problem in my hometown anyway due to the huge amount of trees. They were EVEYWHERE, and for every tree there were like twenty squirrels. There were at least fifty trees on my block. ...Yeah.)

Also they somehow got into the walls of our house, so when our hamster went out on an adventure, chewed a hole into the wall, and went exploring? My brother was going to kill every last squirrel if they ate her. (We found her safe and sound, but he still wanted to kill the squirrels, because they liked to try to burrow through the walls and into the living quarters.)

Also I read 'canna lilies' as 'canas lilies' on first readthrough, which was an interesting mental image, to say the least.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Canas Lilies. Hah.

There is a Camas Lily, aka a Death Camas... take that one any way you please.

Most of the time, I have a really, really good idea of what "needs" to go on the page before I even sit down. Like,
"Wings of Love"? That was a first draft. I sat down, unloaded the contents of my head, and posted it.

The key thing is, I knew what I wanted. I wasn't writing just to fill up the page.

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

Ooh, deadly flowers~

Most of the time, I have a really, really good idea of what "needs" to go on the page before I even sit down.
Yeah, usually I have a general idea of what should be written, so that's usually what my first draft consists of. Then I can fill in the other stuff in the subsequent drafts. But to write just to write? Yeah, it's never worked for me.

[sarajayechan.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that a couple of weeks back, I followed a piece of writing advice that I normally avoid like it's poison.

"Just write. Don't worry about it being good-- you can edit it later. Just sit down and write."

See, to me that advice only works during NaNo or if you actually, um, FEEL like writing. Trying to force yourself to write when you're not in the right mood? This is what happens. (http://winds-nocturne.livejournal.com/165383.html) Sure, TECHNICALLY it's decent and doesn't suck, but I wasn't happy with it. And it's a writer's right to be happy with what they churn out.

Also squirrels are definitely evil. Why else do they run in front of cars at just the right moment? XD You may wanna put up a fence around your plants.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

And it's a writer's right to be happy with what they churn out.

Yeah, and mostly I am. I mean, you don't often see me openly frustrated about writing 'fic because it's not something I tend to fret over. Either things are going, or they're not, and if I'm struggling, it's usually because I'm writing "for" something-- a contest or exchange. So this was... an aberration.

A fence won't work with my landscaping, sadly.

[sarajayechan.livejournal.com]

Either things are going, or they're not, and if I'm struggling, it's usually because I'm writing "for" something-- a contest or exchange.

Same here, those are the only times I'll ever "force" myself to write.

Ah. :( Is there anything else you can do?

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

See, to me that advice only works during NaNo
I've never won NaNo following that advice. Writing isn't something you can force, at least in my opinion. It either happens or it doesn't.

That's why I've never been able to do that 365 drabble challenge. I just can't write every day. For me, it just doesn't happen like that.

[sarajayechan.livejournal.com]

...come to think of it the only years I used that advice and won NaNo were the years I wrote crack. Anytime I did a serious story I was lucky to even hit the halfway point. XD;

[myaru.livejournal.com]

The "just write" line is a load of crap. It's good for very specific problems - for example, if someone is shying away from writing something out of fear that they'll suck. Letting fear stop you is a bad thing. But when you're blocked? Give me a break.

I sympathize. The same thing has happened to me.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean... I was afraid of losing momentum, since things were going so well, and I was trying to adhere to some semblance of a "schedule" for updates... but as it went, I'm still "behind" on that schedule and I got bogged down in a text-block of junk.

Grrr.