Themeattics

We learn from failure, not from success!

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Last week I’d mentioned that my only real goal was finishing Chapter 13 and, despite a few setbacks along the way, I’m happy to report in another successful week. Happier, still, to report that the close of that chapter came from forcing myself to sit down and churn out a near two-and-a-half hour session, basically doubling its word count by the end. Closed that session down at something like 11:56PM, too, so it all came in before the close of the day. Wins all around.

I was braindead by the time I finished, so I didn’t have a lot of time to think over what I’d done. Did a little of that this morning and I can’t lie, I’m feeling pretty good about it. Not the actual content of the chapter inasmuch as what that session means, overall. Not that the content itself is bad – there’s room to improve that I’ll get around to with a polishing pass later – but that’s far less important. No, what last night’s block really represents is a return to some kind of form and, better, perhaps a little something new.

There’s been no pretense around here that I’ve been rusty. Slow to get started, easily distracted, disliking a lot of what I tried to make. Been a rough year for the old creative brain, to say the least. Every time I tried to get back on the wagon, that hour long session loomed dark. You wouldn’t believe how long an hour can feel when you’re staring at a blinking cursor on a blank line. Hell, how long five minutes can feel. Let alone when you’re sitting at and directly interfacing with the one device you own that contains almost every known form of distraction and entertainment available to mankind, right at your fingertips. It’s so easy to cave, to fail, and God knows I’ve been riding that line to failure more often than anyone would like to admit.

The only avenue to turning that around was discipline. Some people suggest things to separate from the distraction – writing in a different room, using a different device, etc. – but besides most of those things not really being a viable option for me, they all fall into the same trap. They’re beatable. Each of them is not only admitting to yourself that the distractions can and will win, they’re relying on the idea that you can trick yourself into believing they can be totally avoided. New room? Okay, what if I start watching a show in there instead of working, does that mean I need to find yet another new one? New device? Only a matter of time before I find/install something on it to fill that void of distraction. Hell, even writing on paper requires that I’m going to have to sit down at a computer and get it transcribed. No, it all boils down to the big, scary D word. Without discipline, none of this was going to happen.

November has been a blessing for that. I don’t know why this particular month is the one for me, maybe it’s because I’ll be ticking up another year closer to forty here in a couple of days, but it is. And it’s done a good bit to fight me along the way, just to test things out. Bad sleep, a bunch of occasions to make terrible diet choices, sicknesses. I’ve still managed to clock the time and the words (almost) every day. There have been a few misses, but they’ve been blissfully rare. Eliminating those is part of the plan.

Another thing that’s helped, and this is new, is going about my time with a hybrid approach. I used to be a full-on Pantser – someone who writes without any sort of outline, just gunning it by feel. It worked for getting the story on the page, but when the time came to go back and edit, it led to some truly monstrous reworks that ultimately doomed the project. The failure point there was, now that I think about it, pretty obvious. As someone that wrote almost entirely on feel, huge edits following that same logic couldn’t help but fail. The feel would lead me somewhere else, and then somewhere else, and again and again until what was left was a patchwork mess. So, I tried my hand at outlining. And that was great, I enjoyed the process, but found that not only did I spend way too much time focusing on that and not enough making the actual story, I also hit blocks MUCH harder when trying my hardest to stick to a rigid plan. I was fighting my nature, I suppose, and it was winning.

At the start of the month I knew I needed to crush Chapter 12 into the dirt before I could do anything useful, and once I did, I tried my hand at loose outlining. I knew, at a high level, what I wanted to do with the story. I knew the important points of connective tissue that needed to tie together. What I didn’t have a proper grasp of was what that connective tissue needed to be. Pantser brain was excited at the prospect of diving in and seeing what would happen during the sessions, but, seeing as this is an edit and not a new story, Outliner brain recognized that was a problem. I took a day to bounce ideas of how to tackle this split and found a solution that seems to work – general outlines. These are high-level outlines that are only there for setting up key points I need to hit along my way. I keep them up in a split screen while writing so I can make quick references and figure out how to most efficiently hit all the points while (hopefully) not dragging too much between them or making a frenetic mess.

To that point, Scrivener has been really helpful in setting this up. I can have my file for the chapter open and my file for the part outline open right next to it, making quick edits and updates incredibly simple. Screencapped it for the article image today, both to show how clean of a setup it is and a little insight into what I mean by high level outlining as that’s included.

With all that said, and all the general positivity I’m feeling around what’s been done, I will say with full disclosure that I’m a little disappointed I wasn’t able to make any progress on 14. I had hoped to get that a good way through as well, but I wanted to keep my expectations realistic (for once) and that turned out to be a good call. Maybe this upcoming week will give me the chance for a twofer, but I’ll keep my real expectations to one at a time again. Once more, one step at a time.

And thank you again, Dwellers, for dealing with the recent slew of progress and self-report posting. I do hope to get this place back to a bit of a return to form sooner rather than later, but keeping myself posting is the most important part for now. Until next week. Go and create.