"Hardly Writing at All"

[rowyn]

Lately, I've felt as though I am struggling to get any writing done and not being as motivated by the current scenes as I was earlier in the current project. (And also doing a lot of second-guessing of my decisions on what to show or omit). My buffer (material not yet posted to the beta readers list), which was over 10,000 words two weeks ago, has shrank to 5600 or so.

But every time I go to record my progress (thinking "my lack of progress" as I do so), I am struck by how much "hardly writing at all" works out to. My current slowdown started about two weeks ago, when I went to Seattle. (♥ terrycloth) Where I was not, granted, expecting to get a lot of writing done. Adding up my word count for the last two weeks, it comes out to around 4700 words. For comparison, this works out to an average-per-day that would about suffice to hit my target for the Master Plan(tm) I used back in 2003 when working on Prophecy. A target that, I will note, I never actually hit back then. When I felt like I was constantly forcing myself to write.

And which I am now accomplishing by "hardly writing at all".

o.O

Anyway, I guess I don't feel so bad about my recent lack-of-progress after all.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, I think I'm up to 8000 words on the story I started writing 6 months ago...

[rowyn]

Apparently the stereotype that fanfic is easier to write is not true. :/

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

I'll second the... incorrectness, of this stereotype!

[tapestry01.livejournal.com]

I was rolling right along at a thousand words a day before Conquest, but now it's hard to get back in the swing of things.

[rowyn]

I was maybe doing about that in February and March, but mostly it's averaged around 800 a day. The important thing is to keep moving, though!

[tapestry01.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

May you continue to make such little progress, or better! ;)

-TG

[rowyn]

I did do even better yesterday! Today looks unexpectedly busy, but maybe tomorrow will be a good writing day too. :)

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

Hang on, hang on, I can cut & paste an appropriate comment here! *digs* Aha, here it is, fresh from yesterday:

Sometimes it's nice to have someone to remind us that things are not as bleak as they appear.

...and bonus points for the 'someone' being 'yourself.' :)

[rowyn]

One of the reasons for keeping an activity log -- the main reason, actually -- is to have a record of what I was up to so that I can see "yes, I did stuff in this time period". I often lost track when I feel like I am 'hardly writing at all', and looking at this I wonder if that's actually the worst possible time to stop bothering. :)

[terrana.livejournal.com]

I think this nicely illustrates the idea that everything is relative. You only feel like you're barely writing now because you've been setting quite a high standard with regard to output of late. It's like how what might be considered a good move for an amateur chess player could be seen as an outright blunder by a grandmaster - it's all a question of the context in which you place it.