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Enjoying Writing

I’ve just been writing, and enjoying it.

This is weird for me because I usually hate it. I love the idea of it. I love having done it. I quite like the editing process, especially if I’m weeding out the excess words to make a flash hit its limit. But I don’t normally love the writing itself. But at the moment I am.

I think it’s partly because I haven’t done any for ages so I’m coming back to it fresh. Partly it’s that I’m trying to follow this idea I read about where you do 20 mins a day and stop when you hit the time limit, even in the middle of a sentence. Especially in the middle of a sentence as that gives you somewhere to pick up on.

Actually I’ve done more than the 20mins for the three nights this week that I’ve been doing it. At least my ‘writing time’ has been up to 2 hours and more but time actually spent on a personal project has been 20mins – or a little more. The rest has been reviews and crits and reading others stories and writing forums. Also tonight I spent some time organising my folders and creating a document template for the Eurofiction ‘house style’.

I’m also at the beginning of a lot of things. I’ll list my current projects in a second, but it feels like I have all this time stretched out in front of me. Days and days before I have to hand anything in. So I can spend a few minutes noodling around and brainstorming and well, playing, without having to worry about forming it into a story. But actually that’s ok. Because all joking aside if I avoid the 10 days of procrastination and 2 days of actual work of my “stages” then even actually putting ideas down at all gets me one step ahead. If none of my ideas are formed, at least outlined, as real stories by this time next week then…

Current Projects

Eurofiction Task 1 – got the prompt for the first round of EF 2009 last night just after midnight. A choice of three settings for an argument. I’ve sketched out vague ideas for all three and real possibilities for a couple.

AFO September Challenge – this one’s a good one. There are about 5 required elements – Travel, Alcohol, Loss, Dialogue and something Jaw-dropping. Except that none of them are required if you really don’t want them to be as long as the story’s good. So they’re more jumping off points, inspiration. I’m glad the challenge setter took this approach. Sometimes these multi-requirement challenges can be more about puzzle than prompt. Which is fine but I do the challenges to improve my writing not to prove I can fit 14 Beatles lyrics into a 500-word story about ducks. Anyway I’ve got an idea for this and I like it.

TWI Monday Flash – a 250-word flash competition that runs from Monday evening to Friday night. I’ve got a 270-word rough draft of an idea that’s fun but silly. I’ll polish and bring it up to 300 and then pare it back down to the needed 250.

It’s interesting because if you look at deadlines etc then I should work on TWI (tomorrow at 9pm) then EF (13 days and a couple of hours) then AFO (a whole month, nearly) but it’s measure of how much I like my AFO idea that I’ve worked on it tonight anyway. Though to fend off potential guillt I have in fact worked on all of them tonight.

Oh and I wrote in my blog

😉

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Time

M. got me a couple of books on writing for Christmas. In the introduction to “A Novel in a Year” Louise Doughty asks

Think what you are prepared to sacrifice. Writing a novel takes many, many hours, and those are hours you could spend planting roses, raising children, earning money — or even just having a nice life. What, in your life, is going to disappear, to allow you the time to write a book?

Well, I’vc got no roses to plant or children to raise, but nevertheless that hit home. Mostly because I think, I’m aware a) how much time I seem to waste doing nothing, and b) how long it seems to take me to write things[1]. And then, even within the general category of ‘writing’ there’s a lot of activities I might undertake:

  • AFO reviews and critiques
  • AFO challenge stories
  • both of M.’s books are work-books, books with exercises I can work through
  • blogging – which itself is many categories (more later perhaps)
  • reading – everything I read on writing says to read more, and I read a lot less than I once did. And a lot of what I read is other amateur writers – which is fine but I’d like to start exposing myself to really good writing.
  • Big Serious Writing Projects – not even sure what these will be yet. Maybe they’ll be short stories I want to get published, or a novel, or even a screenplay

So what is going to disappear from my life to enable some or all of this? Well first let me clarify that it may only be ‘some’. I’m going to keep an eye on it but I may scale down my involvement in AFO. At the moment I’ve been reviewing virtually every new story, which has been taking hours. I can’t blame anyone else for that, it’s partly an ego thing that I want to be seen as a good citizen and partly a procrastination thing – 90 mins reading and reviewing a 3,000 story is “writing time” without me having to do the really hard work of my own writing. But I’m still pondering. I need to give it more time, see how things develop.

Anyway back to what will disappear? Here’s what I’m thinking so far

  • time not really doing one thing or another. I spend a lot of time half doing things. I’m watching TV but also surfing the web. I’m supposed to be writing but I’m fiddling with computer settings. If I can reclaim even a little of this ‘noodling around’ time I’ll be doing well[2]
  • Watching TV – much as I hate to say it, having spent a good part of the last year establishing what is now a really nice MythTV system, I spend too much time watching TV. So on stats alone, since it’s a large proportion of what I do, it’ll need to be a large portion of what I need to give up. Fortunately that’s not too hard (I think). A lot of what I record on Myth is might-be-good-let’s-record-on-the-offchance crap which I then watch just so I can delete it and keep the disk from filling up. I think I’m going to stop doing that. Or at least I’ll set it to auto-expire and if I don’t get around to it before it does, oh well.
  • Surfing the web – same rationale as the above. It’s what I spend a lot of time doing so there’s a lot of scope to cut back. This will actually be helped by the fact that I’ve gone a little cold on SoF (which used to account for many many hours online), now I mostly check it through habit. A lot of what I read I’ve seen before in some other form now. Interestingly, M., who I met on SoF, feels the same.
  • some late night chats with M. – ok, a slightly delicate one, since I haven’t actually mentioned this to her yet. It’s not the chats per se I want to cut back on, just some of the lateness. M. and I have the ability to just talk and talk, which is wonderful and the sign I think of a close friendship, but sometimes we try to live up to that even when we’ve not got a lot to say – so somehow there’s a feeling that all’s not well if we only chat for half an hour. And the lateness causes tiredness which makes things like sitting down to spend an hour writing a challenge. I know it affects M. too. What I want to do is to actually do stuff which we’ve talked about in the past such as having a limit to how late we talk on week-nights and not trying to force it when we’ve neither got much to say.

How much time that will realistically net me I’m not sure. However I’ve put together a vague plan of how I might spend my “writing time”:

  • Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – an hour of “writing” time and half an hour of reading. The writing time will usually be AFO related. I’m going to try to make sure I alternate between reviews and my own writing.
  • Saturdays – two hours writing time spent working through “A Novel in a Year”. It’s got a weekly structure and I don’t want to get ahead so any “spare” time can be spent on AFO/other projects. At least half an hour reading.
  • Sundays – three hours writing time (probably in 2 90min sessions) working through “Creative Writing – A Workbook with Readings” with is a pretty serious textbook (also a present from M.) Half an hour (or more) reading – although Creative Writing has readings in it.
  • Mondays and Fridays – these are “writing optional” days. I deliberately worked in some flexibility into the system. I can write if I want to, feel inspired. Or just have the night off, start/end the weekend if I’m tired. I’d probably write my blog on a Monday or a Friday. BTW I want to start blogging at least once a week. What I’m going to blog about is best left to another post I think (this must be pretty long by now[3])

Anyone who’s noticed that this looks suspiciously like New Year’s Resolutions is right but I’m not going to get too hung up if I don’t stick to it. If I miss it one day, I’ll get back to it the next. If I only half-keep to it I’ll be doing a heck of a lot better than I have done.

2008 is the year of me taking writing seriously!

[1]On monday I wrote a 2,000 word story for AFO. It took me two hours to write, another two to re-write/polish and it still felt like a rough draft when I was done.

[2]I think some noodling time is essential otherwise I’ll feel like I’m too regimented.

[3]Eek! Just check preview and it’s very long. Oh well. You read to here didn’t you?

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Gvim and vigour

I had the urge to blog tonight. I haven’t for a while and I feel like I’ve lots to say. However it’s getting late and I don’t want to be too long.

So I’ll try to be quick on the subject of gvim.

gvim

Gvim is “graphical vim” and of course vim is “Vi IMproved” and vi is an editor on Unix/Linux. So what I’ve done is set up gvim. I’m going to use it to write with. At this point anyone who knows what vi is like is probably thinking I’m crazy. For those who don’t, vi is not a word processor, it’s a text editor. It’s an editor with an obscure, esoteric and out of date way of doing things.

But I’m used to it. It’s been on every Unix/Linux computer I’ve ever used going back nearly 20 years. I already use vim to make posts to AFO. You may recall I use tin

tin

as my newsreader, but tin allows you to configure your own editor. So I went with vi, or rather vim. The difference between vi and vim are subtle but important. Vim has many more features. I’ve only scratched the surface but it’s the ability to customise and configure shortcuts that I like. So I’m basically using those well-worn vi commands, but I have an auto-wrap at 78 columns. I can re-align a paragraph with a single keystroke. I get colour-coding of my headers and quoted text.

Since at the moment, I’m mainly writing for AFO, and AFO is usenet which is a ‘bare text’ medium, I don’t need fancy word processor features (by which I really mean simple stuff like bold, italic, font sizes). And as much as I like OpenOffice, especially the not-having-to-buy-MS-Office part, it’s slow to start and feels like overkill to type what is essentially text, maybe with the occasional underline.

Actually OO has downsides for text as I’ve discovered. It converts double-quote characters into left- and right- curved quote characters. Which look cool – in OO – but are in some extended, probably unicode, character set. When I Save As text and then copy and paste into tin, which is configured for plain ol’ ASCII, I get ? instead. Now I could figure out how to get OO to stop converting them, or figure out how to get it to convert them back when I save, or configure tin for full character set support – but in the end it’s easier just to write ASCII.

Usenet has conventions for most simple formatting. Behold bold: *bold text is between asterisks*. Observe italics: _underscores mark italics_. So I am mostly ok. If at some point I want to start writing for other outlets and want a .DOC, .RTF or .PDF file, OO will still be there and I can adapt any text docs easily enough. I may even figure out a little script to convert usenet formatted text to something OO could import. That’s the sort of thing I’d enjoy.

The only remaining question is why the g? Why gvim? No real reason. It has a few buttons to do common tasks. All of which are merely doing the equivalent of various keystrokes. It stands alone and can run from the desktop. But then I could run regular vim in a terminal, even create a shortcut for it. No, the only real reason was that the simply excitement of installing gvim, configuring it the way I like it and setting it up with a desktop shortcut,

shortcut

is a motivation for me to actually use it. In other words, it helps getting me writing again. Which is important. I’m enjoying writing at the moment but getting myself down to it is still a bit of a challenge and the inner child in me can go “ooh shiny new toy” at gvim to get me over that initial hurdle.

(Those of you who are laughing at the idea that a) gvim is a shiny toy or b) that installing and configuring a text editor is in any way exciting can just go… Well my bet is you stopped reading after the pictures. 😛 as we say in usenet land)