Wow I have really neglected this blog!
I can make all kinds of excuses, but the fact remains I dropped the ball which I seem to do quite a lot, especially when it comes to keeping up with my writing. Life gets in the way, however I happened to get more writing done when I was working a 65 hour a week job than I did back in classes. Over four months of work I wrote around 50 pages of background information in my free time. Since then, I've done nothing.
Fortunately for me, I started back at my job for January through April and will hopefully be getting more writing done. I decided to look back over all of my prior writing and decided that there was one common denominator; a complete lack of organization. I had several page documents on anything that was going through my head at the moment. While I like just getting my ideas out and sifting through them later, I had never actually done the sifting before very recently. The result was a jumbled mess of contradictory work that needed to be redone, so that's exactly what I'm in the process of doing.
Rather than creating a new document for each time I had free time, I have decided to create topical documents ahead of time to guide my thoughts into the right channels. Rather than dicussing geography, food, and the potential side plots all on one document, they each now have their own word doc.
So far its worked out, but down the road I can see it becoming somewhat restricting. Anyone want to share how they approach (or ignore) prewriting? Rather just critique my method? either way I look forward to your feedback.
Welcome back! I love to see familiar faces again :)
ReplyDeleteThanks! Hopefully I'll be able to be a bit more focused this time through. I've had some pretty major breakthroughs in my life and my writing so there's a bunch for me to write about that won't leave me (and presumably everyone else) bored senseless
ReplyDeleteglad i made it to your blog in time for you to come back!! new follower, hi!!
ReplyDeleteHello! I've never done any prewriting, I'm a pantser and write when the muse hits and I charge through until I hit the brick wall. It's a very frustrating method but everyone's a little different. Good luck and glad to hear you'll be getting more free time to write! (:
ReplyDeleteI envy you that ability. I'm too in my own head to trust myself to just write when the mood strikes. Having to prewrite everything is incredibly frustrating. My current book idea hasn't even technically started because I've spent probably 4-5 months (across the last 3 years :/) prewriting.
DeleteGotta love that a full time job leaves me more free time than classes