Creative Process (or Lack Thereof)

[singedsun]

For the last few years I swapped regularly writing just about everything with an extremely limited amount of RP I was doing on the board I ran. My creative drive sort of shriveled up in the last two years of running that place. It wasn't the board itself or even the RP, it was a toxic friendship combined with some real life emotionally draining things combined to just make me struggle for even a little bit of creativity. As much as RP invigorated my writing when I was doing it with just one or two partners six or seven years ago, the situation I was in on the board with this friend/co-admin just took the wind out of me. It wasn't just her though, I went through a few years where it seemed like every fandom friend I made just ghosted me, even ones I'd known for years. Kind of a blow to the ego, especially if you're writing/rping with them right up until it happens.

With this transition back to DW I've felt like I've caught back up with the person I was more than seven years ago. Back then I wanted to write and create and be involved with fandoms on more than just a lurker basis. I ran challenges and communities and swaps and felt like I could pick up anything and write it. Removing the toxic/bad stuff and coming here where people are talking and active has helped me connect a bit more. In the interim, Discord and the couple of D&D games I've picked up have also really helped with that.

Honestly I'm not sure what my actual writing process is right now. Mostly it's as simple as putting on some music videos from YouTube or firing up a playlist on Google Play, then just concentrating on what I want to write.

I was inspired after Yuletide to pick up a weird (for me) fic idea off someone's requests that I want to finish writing as a treat this year. What I've been doing with that is just trying to pick off a few sentences at a time. It's mostly dialogue at the moment so it's easy to just pick up and write a little bit every day.

I'm not setting a daily word goal or a sentence goal, just a goal to write every day. I did sign up for getyourwordsout at the 75k level to set myself a yearly goal. I remember from the last time I did it in 2013 or 2014 that I made my goal as long as I just agreed to write something every day. That's my plan again this year. (I've adapted the spreadsheet I used in 2014 for this year and am going to try and use that for keeping track of things.) I say I'm not setting daily goals but my spreadsheet does track them. There's color-coding to show me word count totals. I just don't think about it when I'm sitting down to write... I track it after and feel good if I've made a dent in my word count for the year.

I write in a variety of places. I use Google Drive and OneNote mostly. I find OneNote useful as sort of a monthly diary/tracker kind of thing (in addition to the bullet journal I take with me everywhere). If only OneNote had a word counter in it, I'd use it way more. So I kind of switch back and forth between OneNote (where I can build in a lot of subpages that are easily arrangeable) and Google Docs for like back-up/storage. I tend to think of OneNote as temporary housing for stuff, even though I have notebacks back to 2013.

When writing bigger projects, I'm a pantser. I dislike outlines, they make me feel constricted and I always hate seeing the conclusion of a thing before I've actually written it. I'm slowly trying to shake myself of that, trying to find a middle ground between plotting and pantsing longer stories. I feel like I'm putting a lot on this year to improve my writing and my writing habits. But I also feel like I've been stagnant so long I'm due for some growth.

Comments

[meridian_rose]

I relate to a lot of this. Best of luck with your gywo goal :D