fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 12, 2012 - 7:46pm

Let’s all get better at cleaning up the mess we create for others who didn’t ask for it. I find that doing small things can psychologically train you to get better at becoming more accountable.Start by making up your bed in the morning after you wake up. No seriously… try it for a few weeks and you will flip a switch in your brain that says “This is my bed, I slept in this bed, I made this bed messy and I will fix my bed up because no one else is obligated to make my bed for me.”  It’s an action that sets you up for accountability for the rest of the day.

Bobby Goshal from over on http://bobbyonboard.com/

Right now I am on about doing more things right and disciplining myself into a regular w(riting) regimen. I look for insight in everywhere I go and in everything I read. I've got 12 pages of untitled synthesis that hasn't been edited or named. That's either a sign of procrastination or a bump in my productivity in finding things that are relevant to how, why, what or who is in my story and by story I am referring to my trilogy that starts as a hacker in the eighties, moves through the corporate takeover of government and on to another world a thousand years in the future.

Discipline is a set of habits. Habits are generally acknowledge to take twenty some odd days of attention and practice to reach a semi permanent status where they become automatic behaviours which are henceforth part of your day to day existence.

I had a day off today, an extra day and since it is onset winter on the we(s)t coast I spent it productively in front of my computer screens researching, surfing and writing. I found a whole bunch of back story for my criminal hacker peer of the protagonist. He's evolving from a wrong place wrong time wrong action beginning, a kid, to a dangerous cunning individual who is skipping school and getting an advanced education in a federal penitentiary. The protagonist will be of similar stature and brain power but will be seeing the world from the juvenile side that involves first dates, homework, stealing time and resources for personal interests and having real friends. We'll find out if it is enough to be smart when they come together.

I remember in the development of the main characters in the SM Stirling's Emberverse where the power of electricity went off in the whole world. Vast zones of death occurred and civilization had to rebuild. It was like the Spanish coming to the new world, they had their germs (bonus), they had their steel and they had their guns (cannons) but most of all they had their history and they knew they could conquer a nation. The characters in the Emberverse series all came with various skills that helped them survive the  new world they found themselves in. The 'bad' guy was a medievalist and his society was fashioned along those lines, he was neither stupid nor slow and was quite capable of doing his own dirty work. The good guys were tree huggers, academics and ex-military.

I want my characters to be that memorable. And I want my story to be good. And all of this is going to take discipline and practice. That's what I am working on now. I've got the writing tools from Notepad++, AbiWord, Scrivener and Liquid Story Binder XE plus a little side thing called Snowflake Pro. That in itself is a recreation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Notepad++ was too small. Liquid Story Binder was too big and Scrivener turned out to be just right. AbiWord allows me to read all the War stuff easily. Snowflake Pro is a wild tool from the guy who wrote Writing Fiction for Dummies, I'm sure I will use it once I've got the pieces together to lay the whole project out.

I guess this all reads like an introduction but what I wanted was discussion about things I don't see or that I need to do that supercede or complement what my plan is. 

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like November 12, 2012 - 8:06pm

Will this be your first book?

Fritz's picture
Fritz November 12, 2012 - 8:19pm

Write

fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 12, 2012 - 9:00pm

@JY:  Yes, nothing else counts - no matter what it was.

@Fritz: heh heh, eh? Can you not see a couple of hundred words right there about how much I am thinking on this and how much I am organizing. Bet you get lucky all the time. 

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like November 12, 2012 - 9:20pm

So, "writing" is not the answer... nor "reevaluating."

Focus...

Direction...

Malleable intent...

Indiscriminate pluralities of sex...

Cotton-mouthed ape-men of the sixteenth dimension...

One particular pot-headed gorilla named Stuyvesant, he being one of many elsewhere, elsewhen.

 

Covewriter's picture
Covewriter from Nashville, Tennessee is reading & Sons November 12, 2012 - 11:18pm

I tend to procrastinate, as much as I love writing, by deciding I need to read some more short story collections or some essays, then I've put off my actual writing, or thinking I need to clean up my office first, then write. I like the war deadlines, or contest deadlines. they help me get on with it. 

GaryP's picture
GaryP from Denver is reading a bit of this and that November 13, 2012 - 6:43am

May I suggest, per Mr. John Cleese, to allow some play time as well? Productive play time. Cleese, who has studied creativity and given many talks on the subject, suggests that people need to let their playful side out at times to mull a problem. If they're always heads-down, he suggests that they are less creative because they have not allowed their subconscious the space it needs to help in the process. He suggests a 1.5 hour block of time once every week or two (so nothing extreme). It's a time to brainstorm and "play" freely without ANY editing or negative thoughts. Allow your brain to run free for that 1.5 hours and come up with extremely silly ideas. Here's the full video from which I thusly grabbed said talk about creativity.

Seb's picture
Seb from Thanet, Kent, UK November 13, 2012 - 7:07am

I find writing, much like love, is a choice, not an emotion. You like someone, find them attractive, get to know them, feel all mushy inside, this is all fragile emotion. You choose to love them, that is a decision, a commitment. Talking about writing, thinking about it, waiting for inspiration is dead time. Decide to write. Take a word, a phrase, start a sentence. Write anything. I got stuck a few months ago, a couple of chapters in. I stepped back, started writing a whole new book. My opening chapter was great. Then I realised it would be even better as chapter 4 of my current project. One integration later and I have a nice, unexpected turn at chapter 4, setting up the next few chapters very nicely. I'm now on chapter 9, nearly 30,000 words in. I was thinking about a completely different story yesterday, yet again. It is potentially weaving in as chapter 10 or 11, we shall see. I may also backtrack and throw in something unexpected earlier at chapter 9, pushing the current 9 to 10. Or maybe I'll condense 8 and 9 into one, and throw in the unexpected as the new 9. The thing is, it doesn't matter, as long as I write something. I now write most days, at work, at home, in the car whilst waiting for the lady, whenever and wherever. In 4 months I've written just under 30,000 words. Some days it will be one or two sentences, or changing a word earlier in the chapter. Other days thousands pour forth. But I commit, no matter what. Even if I just re-read the whole thing and don't type anything new, just make sure the text is consistent from the start, it counts as 'writing time'. Like Hammer time.

fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 14, 2012 - 5:14pm

@jy: yes focus and direction. assembly of the disparate parts that are already collected and filed and openings have been written as well as bridges and joiners.

@garyp: that was a delightful and painful reminder of what is still happening in the 21st century. I sent it off to my buddy who spends a lot of time thinking and a bit of time coding, to great effect, that I think wouldn't mind having a confirmation of his methodology.

@seb: I dunno about the love analogy but your writing experiences ring true, another good method of thinking about the story and its creation/building.

fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 13, 2012 - 6:06pm

I had to forcibly  wrench myself back to reality this morning after the fourth incident of inattention. I was off on tangents of plot and action after a day spent here. It just wouldn't stop, I was with the muse. I needed to be firmly grounded in reality. Bad things happen if I don't pay attention at work. My best time to hang with my computer is in the morning, coincidentally that is also when I have to be diligent about my job lest things go off the rails. LitReactor it seems is habit forming if not somewhat addictive. 

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like November 13, 2012 - 6:22pm

I'm on here too much...

fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 14, 2012 - 5:17pm

And she's dead. RIP thread #2.

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like November 14, 2012 - 5:34pm

Was it my fault?

It was my fault...

fport's picture
fport from Canada is reading The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond November 14, 2012 - 5:56pm

When starting a thread one should put some thought into where it can go. This one was ill conceived and really had nowhere to go. Taking responsibility...FFS what kind of topic is that when you are surrounded by creative people who would like half a chance to make a go of their writing and here I am on about making the bed. Okay it was fiddly bits about my tools and what I read once. Who cares. I should read more threads and see what people get all fired up about and then apply a little spin every once in awhile to keep the ball rolling. Everybody loves to procrastinate instead of working in solitary. You have to give the audience something as an excuse to not have to do the hard stuff. I failed to do that, it was truly mundane. My apologies. It was all J.Y.'s fault.