Happy Sunday, Everyone! Hope you’re enjoying the weekend!
I know I’ve talked about not limiting yourself, or setting parameters on your writing. By that I mean not putting constraints on yourself such as:
“I can only write in the mornings – or at night.”
“I can only write in this coffee shop – or in this particular seat in this particular coffee shop.”
You can see what these are, right? They’re excuses waiting to happen. Excuses not to write.
There will always be reasons. There will always be things that will want you to put off your writing.
You don’t want to add any more.
This year has been a year of change for your, constant blogger (Well semi-constant. It’s not like I do this every day) and I’d like to lay a few of them out for you here.
The first, and I must say, the most pleasing is that I’ve been doing a lot more writing longhand this year.
It should be a bittersweet kind of thing, because my wrists are trashed from several years of flipping burgers in my mis-spent youth to the point where my fingers go completely numb if I write longhand for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
After that, my penmanship goes straight to hell and I have to stop writing because I can’t read what I’m writing anymore (What, you think I’d stop writing because I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore? Scoff!).
It sounds pretty lousy – and it kinda is – but it takes a back seat to the pleasure of putting a good pen to paper. Under the right circumstances, you can hear the pen scritching across the paper. You can certainly feel it (Assuming you can feel your fingers).
I love that…and I’d better stop right here before I talk myself into buying a fountain pen.
Seriously, I don’t need something else to collect. I hear they are as addictive as tattoos.
Hmmm…Tattoos…
Anyway, I started thinking about why it was that I’ve increased the amount of longhand writing that I’ve been doing, and I’ve come up with two reasons.
The first is that it forces me to slow down.
Yeah, I know, some of you are out there saying “Whaat??” How can this be a good thing?”
Well, I’ve reached a point in my pseudo hunt-n-peck typing style where my fingers can keep up with my head pretty well.
Sometimes, usually in the mornings, I need a slower burn to get me back into the story. Once I’m there, I can pretty easily hit my stride.
Another reason has to do with the flexibility that longhand writing provides. I’d been (Against my own advice, I might add) putting a constraint on myself labelled, “You can only write on your laptop.”
I needed an alternative. No, I don’t have a tablet, and typing on my phone would be…um…clunky. Yeah, that’s what we’ll call it.
So here, longhand was the path of least resistance.
Which brings us to the second change: Writing in different locations.
My primary writing sanctuary is a room over my garage. This year, I’ve started taking my laptop out to a coffee shop to write with a group of local writers.
Also, I’ll bring my pad of paper in to write during my lunch breaks when I’m feeling underproductive.
Here’s an interesting side-note: As it turns out, I am utterly incapable of writing and eating at the same time. The mental switch between the two is so significant that I get knocked out of the story, and have to work my way back in.
The best I can manage is sipping coffee or tea.
Go Brain!!
So there you have it. Writing in different places. Writing on different media. How has it been working?
I’d say it’s been working pretty well. I’ve been writing every day in one form or another for about the last month and a half. True, I’m not sitting there generating thousands of words writing longhand – my fingers would never stand for that – but it has given me running starts in the mornings and, after all, any progress is better than no progress at all.
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Be sure to check out the Freebies Page for story Excerpts.
Be safe Y’All.
Time: 8:23 am – ish
Music: Unleash the Archers – The Awakening