I know. No one wants to read a post about this but … well … I’d like to spend a few minutes to write about writing.
Over the weekend I published a couple more excepts from a serialized story I’ve been working on called The Wander Guy which may, as these things tend to, become yet another temporary experiment in starting a project that I never finish. As always, I find myself with an abundance of creative energy but caught in the endless trap of being locked out of the necessary patterns of lifestyle that would allow me to put in the time to accomplish something so grand as writing a novel.
The words I’m kicking out into the internet here are unpolished. I’m tapping out ideas in the raw and paying heed to little more than their substance while ignoring style and format and consistency.
It is practice. Practice with consequence in the form of publication.
If I could muster the focus, I would build myself into a daily habit of writing something. A daily affirmation of fiction on the page, words in the file.
The effort is less flustered by the time than it is the ability to concoct a new element to a complex story on a daily basis. Inspiration is a fickle friend. She stops by for a visit on her own schedule and ignores the wants and desires of the author.
Daily writing is my holy grail of projects, you see. It is that thing which I can tackle for a few weeks, maybe even a month, but the effort is draining mentally and soon I find myself writing garbage to meet a quota in the hour before bedtime rather than adding positively to an inspiring story.
The Wander Guy is yet another attempt at that daily writing effort… but with a twist. Writing a few hundred words each week with the aim to post another serialized blurb onto a much more grand story by Friday. My weekly affirmations will be to snowball the narrative little by little until it compounds into something worth throwing about.
Until then… just words.