I find myself going to Montreal...
Nov. 12th, 2004 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msagaraOn fairly short notice, for the weekend. For ConCept, which is the 13-14th of November.
I've been thinking a bit about a couple of questions asked elsewhere, vis a vis writing, and will post when I get home; I'm leaving on the overnight train (and mourning the loss of my beloved sections; they've changed their trains, and now offer rooms and deluxe rooms, but no sections!), and will arrive at some very early hour, which is made bearable only by the promised company.
I'm attempting to pack now. I am discovering the writing-avoidance, like packing-avoidance, is built-in. Saw![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cristalia at work today, where, in discussing the "post a line from a work in progress" meme on LJ, I expressed my utter astonishment at just how many works people have in progress at one time. I was never, ever capable of this; call it over-focus. The most that I will have "in progress" at one time are two projects -- and in that case it's because I've put the one in project on hold to meet a different deadline, which I will meet before returning to the work in progress. I didn't always tend to be quite so focused; there was a time when I could work on both a novel and a short story (but only one of each) at the same time, doing one in the morning and the other in the evening. That would be my definition of multi-tasking; I've never had a dozen projects on the go at the same time.
To everyone who has more than one, how does that work for you?
More later.
I've been thinking a bit about a couple of questions asked elsewhere, vis a vis writing, and will post when I get home; I'm leaving on the overnight train (and mourning the loss of my beloved sections; they've changed their trains, and now offer rooms and deluxe rooms, but no sections!), and will arrive at some very early hour, which is made bearable only by the promised company.
I'm attempting to pack now. I am discovering the writing-avoidance, like packing-avoidance, is built-in. Saw
cristalia at work today, where, in discussing the "post a line from a work in progress" meme on LJ, I expressed my utter astonishment at just how many works people have in progress at one time. I was never, ever capable of this; call it over-focus. The most that I will have "in progress" at one time are two projects -- and in that case it's because I've put the one in project on hold to meet a different deadline, which I will meet before returning to the work in progress. I didn't always tend to be quite so focused; there was a time when I could work on both a novel and a short story (but only one of each) at the same time, doing one in the morning and the other in the evening. That would be my definition of multi-tasking; I've never had a dozen projects on the go at the same time.To everyone who has more than one, how does that work for you?
More later.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-12 09:05 pm (UTC)Sometimes an idea will ambush me and I'll take guilt-inducing time aside from a main project to get the new idea down in some form, as long as I'm in its grip. I shove that into some sort of labeled idea folder within a more general scrap-bin on the computer. Some of these are clearly novels (they must have awfully long taproots, as there's very little top-growth showing as yet), and others look more like short stories, but I make no assumptions. As I tend to be more of a long writer, I rarely have neat tidy short stories pop up ready to go. It's those flapping loose ends that a novelist just won't let go of which bug me into going onward...
Later on, when I can't stand looking at the main project, stuck or puzzled or just gone flat, if I have any impulse toward something in the scrap-bin, I'll work on that for awhile, and gradually come back round to solving the problem in the main project.
The problem might turn out to be something fairly mechanical, such as uncoiling flashbacks or a different organization of chapters or noticing circular redundancies, or it might be a problem with ethical consequences from some plotline event which I had not followed out far enough, but it will be something that I couldn't see well enough to sort out before I went off and worked on something else.
More frequently than is comfortable to admit, whatever further work that I came up with on the scrap-story, is related in some way to the problem in the main project--something about the character vp, or the setting, or ramifications from the main conflict.