There is a good reason why people give the advice to "write every day." I'm serious. I know people claim they can go away from a project for long periods of time and still get back to it, or that they "only can concentrate in large unbroken blocks of time," but I call bullshit. Sure, you may not get actual writing done every day, but you really need to revisit your project every day, if even for only a few minutes so that you remember where you are in it, what was next to do on your list, and a rough memory of why you have decided not to do it that way, because that way was a dead-end that ate up major time last time you worked on it extensively.
I am so so frustrated at myself, because I know that each time I have come back to this thing I have spent at least a day figuring out what I have done and still need to do and what is still wrong with the article. And I keep taking a week of work on it, of which the first day is just this figuring out the lay of the land and trying to get some momentum going. And then something else comes along and I go away from it for months because emergencies have come up and then I will go back through this whole damn process once again!
I just want this crap to be done with and sent off. If only I could get it moving again. Anyone wanna give me a push?
4 comments:
I ONLY get writing done when I do it every day. If I take a day off, woe to my writing project! But as you can see from my word counter over at my place, I can write 20K words in 2 weeks if I put my mind to it. (And probably more, if it weren't for these darn kids. Sorry -- channeling Scooby Doo villains right now...)
Call bullshit all you want; different people work in different ways. In the last five years, I've published a monograph, an edited book, and almost a dozen journal articles. All of it was written during periods of intense productivity, followed by fallow periods of between two weeks and six months. 'strues'god. But if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you.
One trick that BH and I came up with was to designate some reward for ourselves if we finished a particular project. It helps with the motivation.
Come on over and we'll go to my favorite study cafe for a mocha and some writing. I often find that a study buddy helps, since then I fear the public shame of being caught looking up web sites for entertainment when I should be working.
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