Drawing instead of writing…oops!
I should really be writing, I suppose. I wrote a measly 400 words Monday, and by Tuesday I was well over 3,000 words behind where I should have been. So in a flurry of writing, I got through another 1,200 words yesterday, so that I was within arm’s reach of the day six goal of 10,000 words. But not nearly close enough.
So, today, what do I do when I should be writing more of the novel? I draw. Lately I’ve been fascinated with the cutesy cartoon characterizations that Katie Cook draws. You can see more of her work on her frequently updated Livejournal. She does awesome drawings of Star Wars, Harry Potter, superheroes, and other geek media stuff. I love the style, and I’ve been meaning to try my hand at it to see what I could come up with.
I thought, if she’s doing geek movies and television, why don’t I attempt video games? And after reading Penny Arcade’s Monday comic, I thought that Assassin’s Creed would be a perfect place to start. So below is something that I whipped together over my lunch break today.
Yeah, I should stick to writing.
My awesome family at Mahoney State Park this past summer. From L to R: me; my oldest son, Caleb; baby Harlyn peeking out from behind mommy's shoulder; my wife, Amanda; my son Alex.
Here’s what I try to do… I don’t always stick to this schedual, but of the scheduals I’ve tried, this is the easiest on for me. Here it goes:
First off:
I do not write in chapters.
I do not write to a set “hours per day”
I do not write to a set “words per day”
What I do is, I write small segments or scenes from my book. Say a conversation between two characters. Or maybe the description of a room. Something like that. I find this easier, because I can see a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Not the beginning, middle, and end of the entire book. Not the beginning, middle and end of the entire chapter. Just the beginning, middle, and end of that one scene, which in most cases is 2 to 4 paragraphs long or about 600 – 800 words.
I make it my goal to write three of these segmants each day. One in the morning as soon as I wake up, before I even get out of bed. One in the afternoon, when I get back in from taking my dog out for his daily walk. One in the evening, last thing just before going to bed. It takes about 15 – 30 minutes for me to write each segment. Or about 40 minutes to an hour and a half each day. In the end I end up with about 2,750 words written at the end of the day. That is, if I actualy sit down and write at all! I should be writing my NaNoNovel right now, cause I haven’t written anything yet today, but instead I find myself reading blogs from other NaNoers. LOL! Some days it’s just hard to get motivated to start writing.
Anyways, When you take it and break it down into tiny chunks like this, it seems like you haven’t written very much at all, when in fact you have gone well above and beyound your word count goal. I hope this helps. Good luck with your story!
~~EK