Gwenda

So, usually I hate maxims and wise little sayings, etcetera ad infinitum, but I make an exception for Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project because I often find myself nodding my head at her posts. The other day, she posted a list of the secrets she’d learned in adulthood that changed her life once she figured them out. One in particular stuck out to me, since I was in a fit of multi-day procrastination:

What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.

I decided I was going for force myself to put this into practice. The three things that offer the most instant rewards when I do them every day, but which I have the hardest time actually being consistent about are: 1) WRITING, 2) eating and drinking sensibly, and 3) exercising. Pretty basic stuff, right?

Since the spreadsheet for a novel doesn’t actually appeal to me, I made a Word document with some tables in it — because I want some sort of spreadsheet, even if not one specifically for my book. I put the quote from Gretchen at the top and made a table with numbered entries for 1, 2, and 3 with Yes or No check boxes for each. Each day, I have to honestly assess whether I did all three of these things. If the answer is NO, then I don’t get to watch any TV the next day, not even if it’s a Veronica Mars day or an Office day or whatever. (Two days a week, I am allowed to take off from any one of these things without sanction but must still do two of them.)
(More after the cut.)

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Oh Woe: Time & SanctionsRead More »

Ben had a great post the other day about becoming reticent about posting about the writing process before things are done or sold–and about how BORING not talking about it can become. He says:

Like, you know how you don’t, traditionally, tell people about the first trimester of a pregnancy? So that if you’re going to miscarry, you can miscarry in peace?

But not talking about trouble and dismay, dead ends and trashed story beginnings and terror, makes this blog, frankly, duller.

And, well, yeah, I agree. (Um, not that Ben’s blog is dull, because it’s not, but that his point is right on: The possibility of failure is exciting. Always, in life and in fiction.) And I’d intended at one point to move those sorts of posts over to the teeny LJ, but I just feel differently about that space than I do about this one. This is my blog, that’s just an annex. It seems weird to exile my posts about writing, and I never really managed to make such posts over there anyway. (It should be solely for friendslocking and commenting and possibly metrics and whining, I’ve decided. Basically, what it is now.)

I was also thinking about this in trying to decide how going through the MFA program was going to change Shaken & Stirred* (or if it would). And how can it not? I’m writing a lot more, and I’m thinking about writing a huge amount more (both my own and other people’s), so it follows that I’d be posting about how fucking hard it is and what I’m learning more than occasionally. I think this place would get dreary pretty fast, otherwise. Also, it seems like MFA programs in general come in for a lot of casual slamming and my experience so far has been nothing but amazing. So I want to inject some honesty about my own impressions into that sea of carping.

That said, posting about work-in-progress and the Process still feels dangerous, for the reasons Ben describes, but screw it. My lone New Year’s resolution was to stop second-guessing. Feel free to skip these write porn posts if you like; I won’t be offended. Sometimes I think a writer’s process is only interesting to that writer, but then I remember that I actually find other people’s processes endlessly fascinating.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post, or at least the second one:

Revision. (Clicky below to follow.)

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Clues of RevisionRead More »