In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Quotes of the Day by Ray Bradbury (and one from me)
* Thanks
* Topic: Email, the “writing zone,” and whose story is this, anyway?
* Public Service Announcement
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“By the end of the third day [at a writing retreat], I find myself waking up eager to write.” David Farland
Quotes of the Day by Ray Bradbury
“The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.” RB
“My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.” RB
“If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.” RB
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” RB
“I don’t control my writing – it controls me.” RB
And one from me that seemed to fit: “I wake up every day eager to write. Eager to get back to my characters’ story.”
Thanks to a couple of folks I don’t get to hear from very often — Linda Maye Adams and Duke Southard — for responding to the question I asked yesterday. Interesting responses.
Comments, pro or con, are always valuable to a blogger because they enable search engines to find the blog more easily. So they’re a painless way for the commenter to help spread the word about the blog on which they’re commenting.
Topic: Email, the “writing zone,” and whose story is this, anyway?
I received an email regarding my on-again off-again linking to a series of posts on how to get to your “writing zone.” To explain, well, I’m a bit of an iconoclast, remember?
Advising folks to jump through a series of hoops in order to jumpstart their creative subconscious only to quash it intentionally later as part of their “process” seems counterproductive to me. So although a couple of those particular posts were at least palatable to me and contained a few rhinestone gems, two others weren’t and didn’t. So I didn’t link to those two. I’ll correct that omission later in this topic.
But while I’m on the topic, advising writers to bring their conscious mind in to “correct” their creative subconscious, likewise, seems counterproductive, and it’s a severe mistake.
Allowing, much less encouraging, your critical mind to correct your creative subconscious is an excellent way to shut down your creative subconscious forever, or to at least make it wary of giving you story ideas. Why should it try to work with you when it’s learned you’re going to shut it down? Every time you invoke your (or others’) critical mind to “correct” your creative subconscious, you’re teaching your creative subconscious that you don’t trust it — which is to say you don’t trust yourself.
And you already know my take on that. 1. Trust what you’ve learned over the years, and 2. trust your characters to tell the story that they, not you, are living.
For example, I’m not living the story that I’m currently writing. My characters are living it. It’s their story. I’m only recording it for them. Perhaps I should put a “writer” character on the generation ship in his own little compartment and have him writing the story the characters around him are living. But then, I’m already serving in that role.
And I know me. If I created that character, I would soon become too envious of him. I would have to kill him off in a kind of jealous rage for his good fortune at having been placed on the actual generation ship — by me. Kind of an ugly, vicious circle, right? So I won’t do that. Better to leave things as they are. The characters will live the story and I will record it for them. But again, it isn’t my story. It’s theirs.
If I wrote MY story, it would bore you to tears by comparison. For example, just thus far today…
I rolled out a little after 2, fed my 9 year old kitten. (She snubbed what I fed her and wandered off for a nap.) Then I poured my mug full of coffee and, due to a physical problem, literally stumbled out to the Hovel to begin my day. I checked the Internet for quotes and for items to include in “Of Interest,” then sat down to write this. When I finish this, update my numbers and post everything to the Journal, I’ll probably play a few games of spider solitaire. Then I’ll finish my commute by moving about five feet to the left to my writing ‘puter to type what my characters give me of THEIR story. It’s much more interesting.
But in the interest of being fair to writing-advice providers who, by the way, would never return the favor, you can read all four of the posts I mentioned at the top of this topic in their entirety at https://mystorydoctor.com/writing-blog/.
Public Service Announcement
If you post a blog hosted on WordPress and the word count at the bottom still reads 0 after you’ve posted, you can click Save Draft to make the word count appear. Just a little tip from yer Uncle Harv.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “Beware the ‘ING’ Construction” at https://killzoneblog.com/2021/02/beware-the-ing-construction.html. I would add, beware advice to not use a construction because some people don’t know how to use it. The present progressive is a useful tense to indicate ongoing action. I’ll just leave this right here.
See “Stand-Alone” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/stand-alone/.
See “A Year for the (Record) Books in Publishing” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-year-for-the-record-books-in-publishing/. Actually this title is misleading. As you’ll see in the article, it wasn’t “publishing” but “readers buying books” that set the record.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 990 words
Writing of The Journey Home: Part 6 (novel)
Day 1…… 1628 words. Total words to date…… 1628
Day 2…… 2011 words. Total words to date…… 3639
Day 3…… 4722 words. Total words to date…… 8361
Day 4…… 3766 words. Total words to date…… 12127
Day 5…… 5161 words. Total words to date…… 17288
Day 6…… 6572 words. Total words to date…… 23860
Day 7…… 4680 words. Total words to date…… 28540
Day 8…… 5834 words. Total words to date…… 34374
Day 9…… 3157 words. Total words to date…… 37531
Day 10… 3615 words. Total words to date…… 41146
Total fiction words for February……… 6772
Total fiction words for the year………… 104249
Total nonfiction words for February… 2790
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 28120
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 132369
Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 1
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 55
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 215
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31