Writing experiment: success

[owlmoose]

A friend invited me to a writing day at his house today. I've never done writing in a group setting before -- by myself in cafes, yes, all the time, but never with other people who were also writing during specified blocks of time (social hour, two hours of writing, half hour break, two more hours of writing). I was curious to see how it would work for me -- would being in the presence of other writers, all (as far as I know) working on original fiction, some friends and some strangers, make me too self-conscious to write? I wasn't 100% certain I could be productive.

Four hours, 4,434 words, and a near-complete draft of my Mega Flare story later, I can safely say: yes, it does work for me, and very well. Especially for the kind of word dump writing I need to do today. I plugged in my headphones, mostly turned off the social Internet (I kept access up for checking maps and stuff, and did look at my mail a few times, but I purposefully logged out of IM), and just wrote. Every scene that I knew I still needed to draft, plus a couple I didn't know I needed until I started writing them. It was an excellent exercise, and I'm feeling much better about my chances of getting this story actually done.

Next step: stitch the thing together (I'm trying out Scrivener for the first time, which I think has been pretty effective for a longer story written out of order; I really wish I'd had it for "A Guardian's Legacy") and see what's missing. Then write what's missing, smooth the transitions, fix up the end a little, and come up with a title. Totally doable in five days. Right? Right.

Comments

[lassarina]

That sounds awesomely productive! I love doing writing parties like that--I habitually host them every Friday in November--and while ours aren't scheduled as hard as yours was, we do find that after a while of socializing, silence falls and then all you hear is keys frantically clacking away.

That's totally doable in five days! (I am loving Scrivener so hard. I nearly never write out of order, but just all the overview things, and having things open in QuickRef panels, is so amazingly helpful to me.)

[owlmoose]

The structure, I think, is part of what helped it work for me. I'm very bad at structuring my own time, so having the external pressure was great. Especially since I'm on deadline.

Five days doesn't sound like a lot from here, but I am hopeful? We'll see.

[zen_monk]

Whoa, nice productivity. Is it the pressure to produce work that inspires you to write as well as added input? I sometimes feel that having a kind of thinktank would help to focus your goals, rather than, say, being in my room with so many distractions. The only way I'd be more motivated to be productive is if I'm somewhere else.

By the way, how did you structure on scrivener? I haven't really utilized all the features on my own stories with scrivener, but that's probably because I'm using the beta version for windows, annnnnnnnd it sometimes changes with each update. And it may bug out on me.

Guess it's Word for me...

[owlmoose]

I do think that the pressure of being surrounded by other people hard at work writing helped keep me on track.

My structure is really simple; I just made a new notecard (page? whatever the software calls them) for every scene, broke it into Part One and Part Two when I realized I wasn't going to finish the whole thing, and then have a separate section for notes etc. I'm on a Mac, so the software is pretty stable. But I do think I will stick with Word for shorter stories that don't need the complicated scene structure support.

[sarasa_cat]

Yay for serious productivity!

I'm a big fan of Scrivener for all kinds of writing, not just fiction.

[owlmoose]

I'd be curious to try it for writing longer non-fiction, if I ever get back into doing that.

[sarasa_cat]

As you've probably noticed, it is really good for capturing notes and ideas and then sequencing them later. I like that everything I might want to capture can be kept in one location.