Brain Restart Initiated. Please stand by…
Posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010So, today I have a bit good news to put out. I am officially writing again… Or at least, I’m back to writing stories and such. Since the beginning of December, I’ve had trouble trying to write fiction. Mainly it was a a minor issue with me being brain-frazzled at the end of Nanowrimo. It happens to me at the end of every nano and as I somewhat expected, it took me a few weeks to return back to actually having the drive to write fiction again. I think it comes from me not doing enough writing during the year. I don’t write like that quite as often as I should, especially not in the summer months and so it’s like a muscle that I only use intermittently. I can push it to the brink and force it to produce for me, but afterward I have to rest it. It’s a pain, but I think I’ve finally figured out a way to fix it.
See, now that I’m actually thinking again (and by the Gods it’s good to be back and thinking again) I’m able to look at this problem and see why it happens. What I have been doing up to now is simply accepting the problem. I had decided that it happened and that was all that I could really do about it. Wait out the mind numbing wearyness and then return to writing. What I forgot, though, was that the mind is a muscle like any other. And if you use and abuse a muscle, it will give out on you.
Lets take a look at the following example. You decide that you are putting on a bit too much weight and start looking for ways to fix the problem. Loving food and hating diets, you decide to try exercising instead. So, you head out to the gym, but find out that you can only use the equipment for about 5 minutes before you are wheezing and sweating up a storm. You continue for another 10 minutes, determined to not embarrass yourself that badly. After you’ve gotten your breath back and can breath again, you get dressed and head home thinking, “Well that was depressing but I’ll do better tomorrow.” Unfortunately, you’ve over used the muscle now, pushing it harder than you should have. The next day you wake up, unable to move without pain.
What the pain is telling you is that you should have stopped after 5 minutes and tried to do more the next day, instead of pushing your muscles to that point of exhastion. The brain is a muscle too, but since it is only with mental pursuits that you can exercise it (and it doesn’t hurt if you push it) you still need to do it regularly or you’re going to suffer a backlash, requiring overly long breaks before you can write again. How am I going to fix this? Well, I’m not going to stop doing nanowrimo… that would be unthinkable. Instead, what I am going to do is try to write every day this year. And I’m going to keep the daily writings nice and short.
I recently found a website called 750 words, which challenges you to go 750 words a day. Now, it will let you write anything, in any genre or style. I’ve been using it as a mix between word program and writing challenge. Out of the 7 days I’ve been on it now, I have used it as both a place to write “my day was _____” type of journal entries, as well as more fantasy oriented super short stories. I am on a 7 day streak now, and for the first time in what feels like forever (even though it’s only been a month), I feel like I am not only writing again (even if it wasn’t on my novel yet) but that I can do this and survive.
So, I am ready to state now, one of my goals for 2011 is to take the WriYe/750 words a day challenge this year. I will try to write 300K this year, which translates to 50,000 words in November plus 750 a day otherwise… with an additional 6K floating in from the ether to make it a nice even 300,000. This will be a really good challenge, especially since the real challenge is not to write 300K, but to write every day. All of my writing, except for pure journal posts and blog posts will count.
Now I did have one odd question for you guys out there reading this. I have a friend (Hello Samantha!) who recently said that she was going to try blogging a tiny bit each day, including the number of words she wrote each day almost as a tag on the bottom. Now I was wondering, would you all be interested in having me do something similar? So that whenever I write, I try to update my blog, even if it’s just to say “I worked on my novel and got 700 words today” or would you rather I only do that on Twitter?
Let me know and I’ll try to keep you updated as to changes in the New Year!
Tags: 2011, 750 Words, 750words, motivation, Nanowrimo, New Year's Resolutions, New Years, samantha herne, Writing
Posted in Blogs by B.A. Matthews | 2 Comments »