Some days, I don't feel like I'm writing so much as I'm herding ideas. I run back and forth between notes and text, up and down paragraphs, cracking out words like whips, trying to get them all moving in the same direction and moving slowly up the trail. The end is in sight, but still so very far away, and the ideas all want to run in circles or get caught in mud flats or have little calf ideas that will have to become footnotes that will probably just be turned to veal before we roll into town.
So, that is today, right now, why I am procrastinating -- or simply taking a break -- to write this post. My chapter is so close to ending, and yet will not get there. Each day, I begin by reading it from the beginning, cleaning up prose, adding and subtracting and expanding notes, and ensuring that any new subtleties or insights don't just pop up where they occurred to me yesterday but are instead embedded in the argument from the beginning. I'm doing good to get a single page of new material each day. At the end of the day, I'm tempted to beat myself up over my slow progress, but remind myself that any progress is progress. I have one more page today than I did yesterday. My story is packed with a lot of story that overlaps with a lot more story, and this chapter could easily be a book unto itself. It just cannot be cut into two different chapters. I've already done that!
So, yee haa! Back to the dogie ideas.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
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5 comments:
A page a day is really good progress. Assuming a 5-day work week, that's 20 pages a month, or 75 pages to a 15-week semester. You're doing great.
And I love the image. Git along, little dogies!
Yesterday ended up being a four page day, so even better! Still, I fear a stampede is in the making and I might be crushed.
Yes! Multiple page days is awesome. Keep up the great work!
(I always find that plugging along means new ideas will come. Whereas if I walk away, the well dries up.)
Ink, you know, that's it. It isn't the pages -- or only the pages -- but keeping the brain engaged with the ideas by keeping them closer to the conscious and not somewhere down out of the way, hiding under the sofa of the subconscious.
Just two pages today, and they were crap -- but they were useable crap!
I find that starting a day with revisions deadens my prose progress. I try to leap ahead, at least every now and then, and write something more new before I get bogged down in revisions. But I'm glad you've been making progress through all of this - that's better than my usual record at this time of year!
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