Turnabouts and Mismatches
Last week, I was in the throes of updating and revising this website and didn't post anything up front here. I'm still mid-throe, as it were, but meanwhile, here's something to mull over.
Last week, the generous and talented Graham Strong, Thunder Bay writer and novelist, directed his blog readers here, to read about how I take crappy photos and yet manage to learn writing lessons from them.
This week, I give you those links to Graham in part because I appreciate his generosity and in part because he's a fellow suffer-er of the vicissitudes of country living (wells in particular). But also, I've been thinking about his novel-o-meter and "journaling the journey" approach to this novel-writing thing. I'm glad he's doing it because it's interesting to watch. So I encourage you go to over there and click around a bit.
As a professional editor and writer of things business and educational and technical, for which clients pay me, I must be aware of time. I can track time I work on something once I'm working on it, but estimating the hours a project will take has never been my strong suit. Over the years, I developed rules of thumb (e.g., double the amount of time in my estimate), but I often find that my estimates are farther from reality than I would like -- especially as I write more fiction and essays.
I am finally starting to accept that my desire to know in advance how long it will take me to "finish" a particular project (defined sometimes as "getting it published" or "giving up on it for good"), for fiction and creative nonfiction, is irrelevant. It's trying to apply a business model to an inappropriate part of the creative writing process. Lipstick on a pig, if you will.
I can certainly track the hours I put in on my fiction/essay projects. I can work to submission deadlines, which represent at least a step along the way toward "finished." I can set time targets (25 minutes at a time!) or daily word count targets for creative projects. But I can't yet accurately predict how long a particular revision (or novel draft, sigh) will take -- and maybe that's okay, too. Maybe it has to be okay. Maybe allowing things to take as long as they need is important, both to my creative development and to the quality of the finished product.
"Take as long as they need" within limits, of course. Nothing gets drafted or revised if I don't DO that. And if I need to put "draft" and "revise" on my calendar, 25 minutes at a time, to make it happen, I can. I do, in fact. And sometimes, I make progress.
In any case, for both "work" writing projects and personal writing projects, I'm always looking for ways to improve my prediction ability. So thanks, Graham, for chronicling your journey in public -- I appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experience.
Last week, the generous and talented Graham Strong, Thunder Bay writer and novelist, directed his blog readers here, to read about how I take crappy photos and yet manage to learn writing lessons from them.
This week, I give you those links to Graham in part because I appreciate his generosity and in part because he's a fellow suffer-er of the vicissitudes of country living (wells in particular). But also, I've been thinking about his novel-o-meter and "journaling the journey" approach to this novel-writing thing. I'm glad he's doing it because it's interesting to watch. So I encourage you go to over there and click around a bit.
As a professional editor and writer of things business and educational and technical, for which clients pay me, I must be aware of time. I can track time I work on something once I'm working on it, but estimating the hours a project will take has never been my strong suit. Over the years, I developed rules of thumb (e.g., double the amount of time in my estimate), but I often find that my estimates are farther from reality than I would like -- especially as I write more fiction and essays.
I am finally starting to accept that my desire to know in advance how long it will take me to "finish" a particular project (defined sometimes as "getting it published" or "giving up on it for good"), for fiction and creative nonfiction, is irrelevant. It's trying to apply a business model to an inappropriate part of the creative writing process. Lipstick on a pig, if you will.
I can certainly track the hours I put in on my fiction/essay projects. I can work to submission deadlines, which represent at least a step along the way toward "finished." I can set time targets (25 minutes at a time!) or daily word count targets for creative projects. But I can't yet accurately predict how long a particular revision (or novel draft, sigh) will take -- and maybe that's okay, too. Maybe it has to be okay. Maybe allowing things to take as long as they need is important, both to my creative development and to the quality of the finished product.
"Take as long as they need" within limits, of course. Nothing gets drafted or revised if I don't DO that. And if I need to put "draft" and "revise" on my calendar, 25 minutes at a time, to make it happen, I can. I do, in fact. And sometimes, I make progress.
In any case, for both "work" writing projects and personal writing projects, I'm always looking for ways to improve my prediction ability. So thanks, Graham, for chronicling your journey in public -- I appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experience.