Writing Frustrations

I’m about halfway into the last of the short stories I’m presently committed to write for Pro Se. It’s coming along a bit slowly as I reach into the middle. But it got off to a rocky start. When it comes to these assignments I do for other people, and especially in a genre I’m not really familiar with, I go through a few different stages of progress.

First off, there’s the planning stage. At this point, I’m really excited about the project, and my hand can’t stop scribbling notes in my trusty writing notebook. I plot out a loose structure from the story—or at least loose in the sense that even if it is detailed, I don’t force myself to adhere to it. I treat it like Google Maps—they give me a route to take, but as I’m driving along, I may recognize another road that cuts down on the commute or I’ll take a detour in case I want to stop off at a store or something.

Next, comes the writing stage. At the beginning, this is the first part of the frustration. I just sit there staring at the blank screen, not sure what to write. I read through my notes over and over and over again, and I can’t get anything done. With this story, I actually wrote two separate introductory scenes that I quickly scrapped.

Then I start getting into the groove, the characters start speaking to me, and we’re off and running. But around the midpoint of the story, I start to slow down and I go back to reading my notes, thinking, “well what do I put in here?” This is another period of frustration.

But if I keep to the grindstone (and when you’re writing a story as an assignment for someone, you’ve got a deadline to meet, and that definitely helps), I push past this part.

Then by the time I hit the word count limit, I’m not quite finished with the story.

At this point, I’m at the middle stage. I haven’t done any writing for today just yet, and I’m typing up this blog entry as something of a warm-up. Lately I’ve been cranking out about a 1000 words a day on this tale, which is good, but today may be a bit rougher. For the Magic Spreadsheet, to keep the writing chain going, you only need to crank out 250 words a day, every day. Obviously I’m shooting for more than that, but it’s good to know that even if I’m having an off-day, all I have to do is throw out a few hundred words to keep pushing on.

As I mentioned in another post, as a consequence of my much longer commute, I’ve been catching up on a lot of podcasts. It’s made me want to get back into podcasting myself. I had a short-lived program about two years ago, but my co-host and I disagreed on the show’s format and we decided to stop doing it. I’ve also appeared on several other podcasts, including Pulped and The Book Cave and really enjoyed those experiences, so I’d like to podcast a bit more regularly. In particular, I’d be interested in doing one about writing, but don’t have a regular co-host (finding one is difficult when you live on the other side of the world) and I’m not so sure people would like to hear me ramble on solo for 30-60 minutes every week.