God, what am I going to write about now, I tell myself as I look at the empty page. I've been doing a solid five posts a day every day for the last week now, and averaging four posts since the last...many many days. Here's my problem: my writings have been only prompted writings without the prompts, and I'm not working towards anything. As in, eventually yes I want to produce novels. To get there though I either need to be working towards the novels or perhaps practicing techniques for the novels. I haven't been working towards novel-writing more recently because I get bored after the first 10-ish thousand words and start writing towards something else. That's when I'm in the 'novel' mood. When I'm free writing I come up with pieces that are...not bad...but they don't go anywhere, it's just text. I'm not practicing my technique, I'm not practicing the craft in anyway. It's just writing for writing's sake...for the habit's sake. To create a habit. Which is great. I get to a required word count pretty quick these days...1000 words aren't as much of a pain and wait for 'inspiration', haven't thought of 'writers block' in...forever...Even when my mood's bad or I'm not feeling well or I feel dizzy the fingers move, the words come out, the characters dance on the screen, creating an imagined reality out of nowhere.
Which is awesome. Incredible, really. really great. From maybe a hundred words in half-a-year to three thousand words a day about is an achievement I could only dream of and here we are hurrah hurrah. This is not enough. There needs to be a rhyme or reason. This was step one, and I'm calling it a complete and total success. Couldn't have gone better. If I maintain this pace for another six months (assuming coarsely that I've been at it for about that time), I'll be a hero among men, a self-disciplined guru, if I may say so myself. But no matter how smart or talented you are you can't always stay at grade 1 because you're so comfortable and you're doing so well. You have to graduate. You have to grow. For all that growth was so that you'd get further. Writing random pieces with no theme rhyme or reason just for the sake of writing is great but that's not the end of the journey. The destination is a place where I'm writing interesting captivating pieces, preferably stories and novels that readers will enjoy reading. And that I have fun writing. In other words, we have to say goodbye to grade 1 now.
When you're starting out in grade 1 you make plans on what you'll do when you reach grade 4. How you're gonna kick everyone's ass, how you'll do everything cool there is to do. As the year goes by you realize maybe you need to figure out grade one things first before you start considering more advanced topics. And soon you get so enmeshed in the day-to-day workings and assignments you begin losing the big picture, which is to be at an awesome place. Everything's a chore because that's what needs to get done first.
This is about the plotting and heavy planning I was doing a couple of months ago. I stopped doing that because the demands of everyday writing were too much to pay attention to it. Besides, I never had a proper template to get started on, and everything was so vague and random it didn't make sense to start from one particular place, because I didn't know what place it would be. Now I need to start in a more organized way. And that's it. This is a declaration that my writing strategy going onward is going to be more focused, targeted, informed, hopefully and more aware of where it is going. When I"m tired bored annoyed angry etcetera there will be posts that are just like, practice pieces obviously, but when I can I'll make them go by the plan. That's the plan anyway. We'll see. Here it goes.
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