Learning Spawns

Ever since the reading I've been tired. I mean it wasn't the reading as such. It was more the massive high point of my birthday party, followed by the stress of reading, combined with a bunch of really late nights and on top of that, work being a bit of a pig. I felt drained and as a result my writing practice was going nowhere. The ideas just weren't flowing. I needed something to dislodge them and restore the stream. I thought that was going to be a good nights sleep but that didn't help. The thing that ended up getting me going again was a textbook. What? Yeah. One those textbooks. One I've been struggling to read since October. The chapter was all about the three act structure and just looking at those various chunks (and trying to work out how my own work fit them) changed something. I guess it was like an association game. I ended up with a step outline for what could be a three to four thousand word short story.

So yeah. Onward once more!

On Focus

I tried a different way of working last night. I usually write in the living room, perched on the edge of the settee, hunched over my laptop. I'm doing it right now. It's not particularly comfortable but this is the room I spend most of my time in because it's the warmest and the most comfortable. What that actually means is it's not a place where I can easily find discipline. There are my books, the TV, the internet to distract me. It's easy to slack off. So I made a change.

I took my laptop down to a small desk area in the basement part of my flat. There's no TV down there, it's colder, it's darker and there's too many walls for my wireless to get through. I sat down in a proper (read: good enough) office chair, turned on the music, made a list of things I wanted to get done and worked for two and a half hours straight. I edited two short scripts and wrote up two story ideas (one as pseudo prose and the other purely as notes). My mind skipped across a couple of other ideas in the middle of other pieces and I got a few more hand-written notes made.

So... For all people may talk about their special writing places, how nice they are, how comfortable they feel, how they feel inspired just by being in a particular room. I'm calling bullshit. You don't need to surround yourself with nice things to write. You just need a chair with good lumbar support, a good pair of noise cancelling headphones and to remove from your immediate vicinity those distractions you always find so tempting. Passion, dedication and discipline help too but that goes without saying. You've already got those.