(no subject)

[bjornwilde]

Sometimes the stories come to you in a completely backwards way. There is no "right" way of creating a story. No single method. You can't programmatise it. Programmatise may not be a word. But I'm using it anyway. See? There's no one method. You can't stop me. I have a medal and a doctorate.

-Warren Ellis

I got this quote in Dr. Ellis' email newsletter this weekend and thinking about it a lot as I look at what's been keeping me from writing. Taking inspiration from this, what bad habits keep you from writing? On the contrary, what good habits keep you writing?

Comments

[holdingacat]

Bad habits? The biggest one is expecting perfection every time. Or at least something that could look like perfection, from a distance. 'This is too dumb' has killed a lot of fic.

That and verb tenses.

OMFG verb tenses. I still find unintentional switches in old fic that I've postd. In BETA'ED fic that I've posted. It's like a virus, wtf.

Good habits? ... Well. I do keep trying, so that's in my favor. :D

[fairy_fixit]

Bad habit: youtube. Recently it's been hours and hours of watching the physics engines in video games fail spectacularly.

Good habits: uhhhhhhhhhhh

[bjornwilde]

So of course I have answers for this...
Bad: "Needing" to be at a keyboard and likely sitting upright, needing things to be quiet, and needing to be alone. I don't know how I got into the habit of this, but I need to stop. I get the noise thing but I can just get a pair of noise canceling ear buds. I think the rest is from either sneaking Milliways time at work or feeling I'm faking it as a writer and so need to hide it.

Telling myself I need to do things the right way; i.e. outlining, planning, character sheets, etc.

Good: Listening to podcasts about writing to learn skills and get "cheats". Continued attempts to keep writing. Letting myself have fun and noticing when I do. Reminding myself that my first and most important audience is myself.

[cottoncandypink]

I don't know if this counts as a bad habit, but barely having the time to breathe is an inspiration killer for me. When I do get some time to myself, I prefer to spend it on an activity that requires as little brain power as possible.

Good habits, once I do get going, I don't really have much of a problem losing focus to go elsewhere. One benefit to never having the time to write means I have a lot of time to think about what I'm going to write, and will often spend a little bit of time in bed doing research that I know will bog me down once I get to it. That keeps me from wandering off to look up something and falling into a Wikipedia hole.

[childofrebellion]

Bad habits: Doubt and waiting to write something down until its perfect in my head instead of just getting it down. I also do the same thing with sharing, some words I'm willing to just go here it is, but other times, I'll talk myself out of posting something.

Good habits: Getting things down quickly. I have a lot of google docs that are a sentence or a paragraph that I like but don't know where they fit. I've been able to go back at some points and put them together to create something new. Also knowing that it always helps me to talk out ideas when I'm stuck and being willing to share my work. Its so helpful to have someone else read it and go, I don't get this or I like this. And understanding how incredibly helpful prompts are to me, they're great for getting my ideas flowing.

[iprotectyou]

Bad habits: I sleep waaay too much. Often times I go to bed at 8:45pm with baby. Which is bad because I only have time to write on an actual computer at night, when baby goes down for the night. Other bad habits include not being able to come up with names for characters and letting that stop me, and losing the critiques my writing group painstakingly makes for me.

Good habits: Uhhh... Once I start, I really get going?

[exiled_heir_of_the_eighth]

Bad habits: Short attention span, constant doubt that I can capture headvoices, allowing myself to be distracted a lot, inability to work on my dialogue-writing abilities, lack of confidence.

Good habits: Writing on my phone because I can type faster on there, making lots and lots of notes, being flexible on my writing time.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bad habits: Mainly it's that I don't even want to attempt writing (or drawing) if I'm in a crappy mood, which is quite often, and getting into a better one can take hours. Also I'm prone to dashing off one tag per thread and then either going to sleep or leaving the house. (I can tag from my phone, but I can't type as fast and it's often difficult to fit the whole text box I'm typing in on the screen at once, so that makes it hard to write anything long.)

Good habits: It takes a long time for me to actually forget about a thread rather than just put off responding to it, and though I only have one active character at the moment I'm good at manually juggling logins.

[sticktothemission]

I'm a day late on this, but it's perfectly relevant to my current predicament and thus I'm using it as a way to kick myself in the pants and get back in the game.

I've been absent due to the move and things have been a little intense since we got here. My bad habit is that I prefer to make plans about my day, even the free time (nothing set in stone, but I like to have an idea of what I want to do each day). With my new commitments here, it's been surprisingly hard to set aside that time when I know I'll have the mental energy to write and the longer I wait the harder it is to be brave enough to just show up again it what feels more and more to me like out of the blue. Likely I'm imagining expectations on myself, but the feeling is still there.

So this is me saying that I will put Gabe in the bar tomorrow. Cos the flip side of needing plans to get stuff done is that once I commit (and announce to others I'm going to do something) I'm loathe to go back on what is essentially my word.

That and I've missed playing with you folks.