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Friday, August 28, 2009

Put off procrastination

I write at night. I work during the day, as most of us do. I am a TV editor and I'm currently working on a documentary series that is pretty intense trying to make it all work and make sense. In general I use a tremendous amount of my creative brain power during the day job and often find that there's not much left by nightfall. That's my excuse anyway to put things off.

Last night I didn't really feel like writing after I got out to the office around 10:00, answered some emails, checked around the blog world for anything I missed and worked on finishing the press release for One Too Many Blows To The Head. That put it around 11:15. Easy enough to call it a night but I soldiered on working towards my minimum goal of 1000 words a day on the new book. Not sure if I would write anything worthwhile or even get beyond 50 words or so I plunged in. I'm glad I did. I ended up with some nice moments and things I didn't know the story needed until I got there. I ended up with about 1500 words and I was really happy with it. Just goes to show you that sometimes all that is needed to get the creative juices flowing again is just to start the juicer. Just keep typing. Forward progress that needs to be heavily edited is still better than no progress at all.

1 comment:

Dana King said...

The same is true for me. Maybe the fatigue also affects our inner censor and allows our minds to think more freely. Just last night I almost skipped my obligation to write one single spaced page (the standard for a work night), but made myself do it. (It's a first draft, so if it's shit I can always fix it.) Turned out the writing was okay, but I turned the scene in a direction I hadn't thought of before which will work much better.