For those who have followed me for a while, yes, I’m still on the low energy phase with the WIP. And as the title indicates, this is a post where I will talk about my strategies for carrying on.
But before I delve into my own specifics, I think the most useful thing for managing this (or procrastination which is not quite the same thing) that I had ever come across personally was what one of the UBC novel writing courses instructor Annabel said, “How you deal with this is either be kind or be strict to yourself.” That might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m a practical person and that’s exactly how I see it in a broad sense.
Moving onto my specifics, I had two issues: the first was that I tend to have the most clear idea of the scenes at the start of the book compared to later sections. I might have talked about this before but the difference is as big as I can convert a certain number of scenes straight from outline into scenes by just expressing my outline as prose in one swoop whereas it feels like there is an entire black hole between the outline and the write up of the scene. And basically I’ve moved on from the easy scenes, all the scenes that I have yet to write for the WIP are black holes. The second is monetary or security inspired and driven by the recurring argument that Mum and I have over the large block of my time not used towards making money (my main job is a casual research assistant, I used to be working at least part time but then in light of current economic conditions post-COVID, my job has become almost on-demand now). For at least 3 or 4 years now, I have been resisting the idea of looking for another career to supplement my income (I was warned against competition ambitions in the course of novel writing during the online novel writing course and I have been eyeing another income supplement warily ever since). But I’m starting to think about getting educated to become a certified translator/interpreter. My initial idea was to become an editor but then I’m not sure how much job I would get as a native Chinese speaking freelance editor and I’m definitely trying to breach into this second source of income as a freelancer (I like my boss and she likes me and I know she’s trying really hard to keep me as her RA and plus I tend to like the job okay).
Now I actually have written a prior post on some of the mechanic or structural ways to break into a scene. But I think the predominant approach I have been using is to just keep on going without measuring myself if I need to. And I have definitely fallen back in pace, from 200 or 300 words per day 6 days a week to basically 100 words per day 5 times a week. What I tell myself is that it’s not the speed that is important but the quality. So it doesn’t matter in the long haul.
Lately, one approach I’ve been using with scene writing specifically is to take it to the point of creative exhaustion. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s basically the point where I’m just done with the scene and can’t work on it anymore or where the thought “You’ve been mired in this scene for x days now, how about moving on?” just arises by itself.
That’s it for today. Let me know if you want to discuss specific parts of this post further.
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