Stupid, on the necessity of being

[resonant]

After my three weeks with little or no writing time, last week was a lovely, open week with endless stretches of time, during which I still contrived to get almost nothing at all done.

Here's the thing. When I'm not writing, I don't forget how to write. What I forget how to do is watch myself write crap.

Only, I don't know about you, but for me that's a necessary stage in the writing process.

1. Write something crappy.
2. Fix it.

Or sometimes:

1. See that I'm not ready to write the actual story. Decide instead to write a rough, which is crappy.
2. Write the story, which is only moderately crappy because I've been able to fix some of the problems at the rough stage.
3. Fix it.

So obviously if my brain is in there talking nasty to me and preventing me from doing step 1 ("My god, that's stupid. You can't possibly put down something so stupid. Better just play some Bejeweled or something until you think of something less stupid"), then I can't ever get to steps 2 and 3, which are where the worthwhile stuff happens.

Next time I get out of practice, maybe I'll just make myself sit down and write something that's as bad as I can possibly make it. Get that over with and get on with my work.

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Heh, stupid ideas are just like stupid sentences for me. So I will stop dead and be unable to continue until the brackety stuff gets worked out in my head. To be perfectly honest, usually what happens is that I just ignore the story and then the next morning I go running, and somewhere between the high school and the park the ideas start resolving themselves.

If it works for you, though, that writing the problem makes you find and solve it, yay for you!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I think that y'all who can work like this must be much less hard-core procrastinatious than I am. Because I am capable of quite literally playing Bejeweled for six hours in a row -- seriously, I've done it -- slack-jawed and thinking about nothing at all and just as blocked at the end as I was at the beginning.

On the other hand, if I take a walk or do something physical (even housework), I usually have more ideas when I'm done. The spouse is fond of a quote from Nietzsche that goes something like, "Mistrust all ideas that come when you are sitting down."