Day 19: The Daily Slog
So, clearly, these posts are no longer happening daily. For whatever reason, it's apparently impossible for me to post the ramblings of my mind on any sort of regular basis.
But total blowage of my proposed schedule aside, today I want to talk about a cool writing trick I have found very useful over the past couple of weeks.
As I may have mentioned before, I'm currently taking a Harper Lee quarter, thanks to the generosity of a wonderful friend. Now, in my writing experience, I have faced a lot of obstacles before: long hours at school and work, the illnesses and deaths of family, friends, and mentors, poverty, the invention of Netflix. All very distracting, and all adding to the challenge of writing. In all my years as a keyboard monkey, though, I never realized what the #1 biggest, hugest, most un-conquerable enemy to my writing was:
Me.
These days, I temporarily have no job. No school. Nothing to prevent me from sitting down and pounding out 5,000, 10,000 words a day. But do I?
No. I do not.
It turns out, the only thing standing between me and greatness all this time was not a total and utter lack of time and mental energy.
I mean, those things were there, too. But they weren't alone. They were backed up by their big, hulking, scary, backup.
Each one of us, I believe, has two sides. Some people compare them to wolves--you know, that meme on the dramatic sunset picture that talks about "the one that wins is the one you feed?" Well, I like to compare them to MMA wrestler dudes. On the one hand, we've got Creative Hammerfist Joe, the pain in the butt dude who gives me story ideas while I'm trying to listen to a lecture on Poststructuralism; I'm very familiar with him. On the other hand, we've got Fatalist Chokehold Rob, who punches the creative process right in the nuts and then stands over you, chuckling, going, "Now don't you think a couple of hours doing transcription tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk would be a better use of your time?"
The problem is, I've been training ol' Chokehold for a long time; I'm used to putting my writing on the back burner, fourth in line behind school, work, and family. And friends. And housework. And surfing the internet. Ok, it's like seventh in line. Chokehold has strong muscles. He's been working out for years, stuffing creative impulses into lockers while I wrote essays and answered phones.
But now I have the freedom to get Hammerfist back in the ring, and the poor guy's muscles are atrophied. He's a sad shadow of his former self, from back in the good old days when all I had to do all day was write, and come up with a creative way to make cooking sound like math so my homestudy teacher would pass me. Sadly, looking myself in the mirror each morning and singing "Eye of the Tiger" has not, thus far, worked.
This is where my daily slog comes in. The daily slog is a writing exercise I do every time I sit down to write. It's a little bit based off of Julia Cameron's "Morning Pages," except I don't write in the morning, and it's not a page-limit, it's a time limit. Before I try working on my novel every day, I sit down and I write for 20 minutes about whatever I'm thinking about. Sometimes, this is a deep rhapsodizing about the nature of being and the beauty of existence. Sometimes, it is an embarrassingly detailed account of how attractive I find Christian Kane.
But total blowage of my proposed schedule aside, today I want to talk about a cool writing trick I have found very useful over the past couple of weeks.
As I may have mentioned before, I'm currently taking a Harper Lee quarter, thanks to the generosity of a wonderful friend. Now, in my writing experience, I have faced a lot of obstacles before: long hours at school and work, the illnesses and deaths of family, friends, and mentors, poverty, the invention of Netflix. All very distracting, and all adding to the challenge of writing. In all my years as a keyboard monkey, though, I never realized what the #1 biggest, hugest, most un-conquerable enemy to my writing was:
Me.
These days, I temporarily have no job. No school. Nothing to prevent me from sitting down and pounding out 5,000, 10,000 words a day. But do I?
No. I do not.
It turns out, the only thing standing between me and greatness all this time was not a total and utter lack of time and mental energy.
I mean, those things were there, too. But they weren't alone. They were backed up by their big, hulking, scary, backup.
Each one of us, I believe, has two sides. Some people compare them to wolves--you know, that meme on the dramatic sunset picture that talks about "the one that wins is the one you feed?" Well, I like to compare them to MMA wrestler dudes. On the one hand, we've got Creative Hammerfist Joe, the pain in the butt dude who gives me story ideas while I'm trying to listen to a lecture on Poststructuralism; I'm very familiar with him. On the other hand, we've got Fatalist Chokehold Rob, who punches the creative process right in the nuts and then stands over you, chuckling, going, "Now don't you think a couple of hours doing transcription tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk would be a better use of your time?"
The problem is, I've been training ol' Chokehold for a long time; I'm used to putting my writing on the back burner, fourth in line behind school, work, and family. And friends. And housework. And surfing the internet. Ok, it's like seventh in line. Chokehold has strong muscles. He's been working out for years, stuffing creative impulses into lockers while I wrote essays and answered phones.
But now I have the freedom to get Hammerfist back in the ring, and the poor guy's muscles are atrophied. He's a sad shadow of his former self, from back in the good old days when all I had to do all day was write, and come up with a creative way to make cooking sound like math so my homestudy teacher would pass me. Sadly, looking myself in the mirror each morning and singing "Eye of the Tiger" has not, thus far, worked.
This is where my daily slog comes in. The daily slog is a writing exercise I do every time I sit down to write. It's a little bit based off of Julia Cameron's "Morning Pages," except I don't write in the morning, and it's not a page-limit, it's a time limit. Before I try working on my novel every day, I sit down and I write for 20 minutes about whatever I'm thinking about. Sometimes, this is a deep rhapsodizing about the nature of being and the beauty of existence. Sometimes, it is an embarrassingly detailed account of how attractive I find Christian Kane.
But can you blame me? I mean, LOOK at him.
The point is, daily writing (the kind without pressure) is necessary to clear out the cobwebs. The cobwebs of, err, the muscles of your MMA fighter. Mixed metaphors aside, it's important to remember that writing can, and should, feel like playing. It should be fun. It won't always be fun-- if you're serious about writing as a craft, then trust me, there will be moments when it will suck. There will be moments when you're typing with one hand and dramatically clawing at your face with the other while shrieking, "This is so bad! This is awful! The muses are going to strike me down! I hate myself for typing this!" But sometimes, it should be fun. Sometimes, it should be easy, if only to remind yourself that it can be easy.
I encourage you to try it! Keep a journal where all you do is just write nonsense for twenty minutes a day. (If you can't think of anything to write, well, you can always just stare at the gif above and describe how you feel about that).
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go take my MMA fighter to the ring. It's time to fight for those pages.
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