WOW Journal, Entry 1
This is my first WOW Journal entry. It probably goes somewhere else, in a different blog, but I don't want to waste time figuring out where. I just want to get this thing out and move on, as I will explain.
What's a WOW journal? It's a journal, by a writer, about writing. Writers on Writing. It's explained in slightly more detail later on, and for reasons that I'll also explain later on, I don't want to spend time reorganizing this post. This is the way it flowed, and I want to make as few changes as I can.
AND GET IT OUT!
Today has been a good day for writing, and it's only just started. As of this moment, drafting this, sometime in the late morning, I had 1848 words, and the day was still young.
I've gotten back to writing online on the 750 words site (that's www.750words.com, and it's explained below). It's minimalistic, distraction free, saves my work automatically and it gives me my word count as I type. It rocks.
I wrote thousands of words there, and then I stopped. Don't know why. Not going to worry about it. And I'll tell you just how many I once wrote if you just hang on. Meanwhile I'm not going to stop again, at least for a while.
I've got another site, e.ggtimer.com running in the background. I set a time and it counts down for me. If I want I can put the time in another window and see what I've got left. Or I can run it in the background and let it squawk when my time is up. And fancy that, I didn't know how to spell squawk.
Here's a quote that's helped me. It's in Write to Learn by Donald M Murray.
I don't have any trouble writing, once I sit down. And for several years I didn't have any trouble sitting down. My problem was finishing. And now I see why.
Through years of training I'd learned to give myself permission to write freely. I bought into Annie Lamott's idea of "shitty first drafts." I accepted Julia Cameron's advice in "The Artists Way" and wrote my Daily Pages, three handwritten pages of whatever came to mind and through fingers. I signed up for 750words.com which some structure around the Daily Pages idea. Julia Cameron's three pages translates, at 250 words per page, to 750 words. Hence the name.
750words keeps track of how many days in a row you're written your 750 (your streak) and will keep track of what you write each day--and forever--both the word count and the content. It will send you emails reminding you to write, if you want. I can go back, right now, and see what I wrote the first day on the site. But I'm not gonna do it because I need to learn not to break the flow of my writing with needless research. When the e.ggtimer goes off, then I'll look. Not until.
The training and the tools helped me write, but they didn't help me finish because as Stafford says, I had "disproportion between...standards and...performance." My standard was simple: whatever I wrote had to be complete and it had to be perfect. My performance was substandard. Kinda by definition.
So when I wrote something that I wanted to publish--and by "publish" I might mean only "post to one of my many empty blogs"--I would edit, and revise, and polish, and research, and .... never finish. I have blogs full of drafts, and a head full of ideas that never made it to draft. I've got years of backlogged research, some eternally bookmarked in my browser in organized categories, some dumped into a category called "Reprocess." Reprocess means: Fuggedaboutit. Only not that honest. Some is organized and disorganized into Evernote (www.evernote.com), another web service, which could help organize and categorize, but only if I used it. Which I don't.
Now, armed with Stafford's advice, inspired by being part of a new writing community, encouraged by Paul Frost, who leads the community, I'm making another run at it. This sentence, in first draft, pushed me past the 2600 word mark for the day, and boy, does it feel good! (There will be no second draft, I'm editing it for stupid mistakes, adding side comments rather than reorganizing it, and then I'm going to push the button, as I will explain.)
One of the ideas I've gotten from Paul, incorporated in today's writing is the Writing Journal. WOW, or Writers on Writing is the name he's associated with the practice. Last week he gave us a couple of examples to show us how it might be used. The idea resonated. That was Monday. Today is Thursday, so it took a while for resonance to turn into reality. But it has.
Looking over it, I think my first WOW is almost good enough for me to put in one of my blogs. It's a pretty solid piece of writing capable of endless improvement, which it will not see. Instead I'll set my e.ggtimer for what I consider a reasonable time for proofing. I'll use some tools for spell and maybe grammar checking. I will carefully turn the knob that controls my standard for publishable writing, turning it down, down, down, until this piece of writing, in it's then edited form is above the line.
And then I'll paste it into my blog's editing window. Render and check it for formatting. Tag it 'writing' and 'WOW' and press 'Publish.'
If you see it, you'll know I did it.
Earlier I had said that when the e.ggtimer went off I would look to see what I'd written before. It did, and I did, and here's the answer. I started 750 words on April 18, 2010. At one point I had written my 750 words for 60 days in a row. Until I stopped (and counting the last few days during which I've started again) I've written 166,585 words and completed my pages on for 184 days. Today, as of the first draft, I had written 2834 words. Today, as of my one and only editing pass, I'm north of 3100.
I am a writer. And what writers do is write. I'm a writer with controllable standards. What writers with controllable standards do is write, then dial the standards down to match what the work can reasonably be, then we meet the standard, and declare victory. If we can't reasonably do that, we dial the standard down again. We write, but we also finish the pieces that we write.
At least I hope so.
As I said: if you see it, you'll know I did it.
What's a WOW journal? It's a journal, by a writer, about writing. Writers on Writing. It's explained in slightly more detail later on, and for reasons that I'll also explain later on, I don't want to spend time reorganizing this post. This is the way it flowed, and I want to make as few changes as I can.
AND GET IT OUT!
Today has been a good day for writing, and it's only just started. As of this moment, drafting this, sometime in the late morning, I had 1848 words, and the day was still young.
I've gotten back to writing online on the 750 words site (that's www.750words.com, and it's explained below). It's minimalistic, distraction free, saves my work automatically and it gives me my word count as I type. It rocks.
I wrote thousands of words there, and then I stopped. Don't know why. Not going to worry about it. And I'll tell you just how many I once wrote if you just hang on. Meanwhile I'm not going to stop again, at least for a while.
I've got another site, e.ggtimer.com running in the background. I set a time and it counts down for me. If I want I can put the time in another window and see what I've got left. Or I can run it in the background and let it squawk when my time is up. And fancy that, I didn't know how to spell squawk.
Here's a quote that's helped me. It's in Write to Learn by Donald M Murray.
In the early 1980's Chip Scanlan brought a quotation from the poet William Stafford whom I later me. His counsel has been a comfort to me ever since:
I believe that the so-called "writing block" is the product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance...one should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing..."
I can imagine a person beginning to feel he's not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's surrealistic. (Timer goes off; reset for another ten) The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now...You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
I don't have any trouble writing, once I sit down. And for several years I didn't have any trouble sitting down. My problem was finishing. And now I see why.
Through years of training I'd learned to give myself permission to write freely. I bought into Annie Lamott's idea of "shitty first drafts." I accepted Julia Cameron's advice in "The Artists Way" and wrote my Daily Pages, three handwritten pages of whatever came to mind and through fingers. I signed up for 750words.com which some structure around the Daily Pages idea. Julia Cameron's three pages translates, at 250 words per page, to 750 words. Hence the name.
750words keeps track of how many days in a row you're written your 750 (your streak) and will keep track of what you write each day--and forever--both the word count and the content. It will send you emails reminding you to write, if you want. I can go back, right now, and see what I wrote the first day on the site. But I'm not gonna do it because I need to learn not to break the flow of my writing with needless research. When the e.ggtimer goes off, then I'll look. Not until.
The training and the tools helped me write, but they didn't help me finish because as Stafford says, I had "disproportion between...standards and...performance." My standard was simple: whatever I wrote had to be complete and it had to be perfect. My performance was substandard. Kinda by definition.
So when I wrote something that I wanted to publish--and by "publish" I might mean only "post to one of my many empty blogs"--I would edit, and revise, and polish, and research, and .... never finish. I have blogs full of drafts, and a head full of ideas that never made it to draft. I've got years of backlogged research, some eternally bookmarked in my browser in organized categories, some dumped into a category called "Reprocess." Reprocess means: Fuggedaboutit. Only not that honest. Some is organized and disorganized into Evernote (www.evernote.com), another web service, which could help organize and categorize, but only if I used it. Which I don't.
Now, armed with Stafford's advice, inspired by being part of a new writing community, encouraged by Paul Frost, who leads the community, I'm making another run at it. This sentence, in first draft, pushed me past the 2600 word mark for the day, and boy, does it feel good! (There will be no second draft, I'm editing it for stupid mistakes, adding side comments rather than reorganizing it, and then I'm going to push the button, as I will explain.)
One of the ideas I've gotten from Paul, incorporated in today's writing is the Writing Journal. WOW, or Writers on Writing is the name he's associated with the practice. Last week he gave us a couple of examples to show us how it might be used. The idea resonated. That was Monday. Today is Thursday, so it took a while for resonance to turn into reality. But it has.
Looking over it, I think my first WOW is almost good enough for me to put in one of my blogs. It's a pretty solid piece of writing capable of endless improvement, which it will not see. Instead I'll set my e.ggtimer for what I consider a reasonable time for proofing. I'll use some tools for spell and maybe grammar checking. I will carefully turn the knob that controls my standard for publishable writing, turning it down, down, down, until this piece of writing, in it's then edited form is above the line.
And then I'll paste it into my blog's editing window. Render and check it for formatting. Tag it 'writing' and 'WOW' and press 'Publish.'
If you see it, you'll know I did it.
Earlier I had said that when the e.ggtimer went off I would look to see what I'd written before. It did, and I did, and here's the answer. I started 750 words on April 18, 2010. At one point I had written my 750 words for 60 days in a row. Until I stopped (and counting the last few days during which I've started again) I've written 166,585 words and completed my pages on for 184 days. Today, as of the first draft, I had written 2834 words. Today, as of my one and only editing pass, I'm north of 3100.
I am a writer. And what writers do is write. I'm a writer with controllable standards. What writers with controllable standards do is write, then dial the standards down to match what the work can reasonably be, then we meet the standard, and declare victory. If we can't reasonably do that, we dial the standard down again. We write, but we also finish the pieces that we write.
At least I hope so.
As I said: if you see it, you'll know I did it.
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