Deborah Kalin

My favourite ten seven things about writing so far:

2. Some writers are idiots. Their stories will often still sell & sometimes find success. Sometimes, a lot of success. This will never cease to be irritating for those of us who want to believe we are not idiots.

3. Writing is one of those rare and precious jobs that will take everything you can throw at it. Knowledge, emotion, smarts, craft, talent, time.

6. Everyone in the world is some kind of storyteller. This is an awesome & humbling thing.

To which I add:

1. If you're having trouble with getting up early enough to write before work, buy a kitten. He will wake you up at the stupidly dark 5 o'clock every morning without fail. You won't get any extra writing done, because you'll be soggy (from his having kept you up late the previous night to play) and he'll demand food and play, but by golly you'll be awake. Perhaps, in the the three years or so it takes him to grow out of kittenhood and into a slightly sleepier cat, you'll have your routine established and things will be much easier then.
2. You will lie to yourself, consciously and otherwise, in order to get the words on the paper. These lies will be small but insidious (Just a half-hour and then I can stop…Another five minutes and then I can stop…). They will unpack with various levels of meaning (First drafts are allowed to be crap …Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!), and these levels will not always be constant. The lies and their efficacy will also change, and the lie that worked yesterday (or five minutes ago) may not work now.
3. There will always be a reason why you can't write at the moment.
4. This does not mean it's not a valid reason.
5. People will give you their ideas. Sometimes they'll be mercenary about it (If I give you this idea and you write it, we could split the profits…), sometimes they'll just want to share. They will also share their techniques with you (I've always thought a really effective way of writing dialogue would be to tape a conversation and just write it out verbatim…). Eventually, you will find your own way of dealing with this.
6. There will always be a story clamouring to be written right this second. This may not be the story you need to be working on, financially or emotionally.

I'm in a bit of a motivation funk these days: I want to work on anything but what I have open in front of me. This is most peculiar, as I don't normally like juggling projects all that much. But lately I seem to have the attention span of an anxious goldfish, so lots of snippets and jigjags of focus it is. Instead of writing the novel I have started and plotted out, I'm 5,000 odd words into Chapter One of a new novel… of which I only have one chapter. I can feel the stall point approaching rapidly

Also? If I could finish a scene in a sitting, I'm sure my mood would be better. Instead I'm left with a character frozen mid-frame, and I carry that mood around until I have a chance to start the narrative up again. This is okay if the scene was a happy scene. But for a scene involving a massacre? Not so great. Faster, that's what I need, to write faster.

Also, the kitten is sixteen weeks old today. Apparently, somewhere between 14 and 16 weeks signals the start of the feline equivalent of the terrible twos. He is now officially a brat. Last week he figured out how to jump up to the older cat's shelf¹, and he's been gobbling her food for the last week. Today he figured out how to jump up to the kitchen bench. Lots and lots of battles of will have ensued. The problem with Burmese being talkative and strong-willed cats is that when you say No, they set their ears back and yowl right back at you. And even when you finally win the fight they'll walk away muttering. Burmese. Always have to have the last bloody word.

1. We have a set of shelves in the kitchen. The older cat is fed on the second shelf. Baby bratling is fed on the shelf below her. [↩]

If you're curious about the difference between verb tense and aspect and their relative importance, Sherwood smith has some light to shed on the subject.