So, I’ve been unpacking and moving in all day–what a freaking chore! It didn’t help that my sister, who left me her car while she’s visiting the family, was 5,000 miles overdue for an oil change, or that it suddenly decided to leak power steering fluid. Holy cow! I could go on listing things, but basically, I’ve been busy all day. That’s not the excuse, though! The excuse is even lamer. While unpacking and moving in, my flash drive with all my writing was buried under a pile of junk (ازبل, as my Syrian roommate taught me to say), and he went to bed before I could completely put everything away. The result was that I couldn’t find my flash drive while glancing over the pile in the dark with my cell phone as a light, and I didn’t want to disturb him so I stopped looking. So, no writing today (::innocent emoticon::). I’ll try to write at least 1,000 words tomorrow.
But here’s a question, and something I noticed: at what time of the day do you do your best writing? At what time of the day do you do most of your writing?
I’ve noticed that with this daily word goal, I’ve been doing a lot of my writing at night, right before I go to bed. I’ve also noticed that I get really loopy right around that time (haven’t you noticed while reading this blog?). I wonder if perhaps it would be better to write at a different time of day. Would that increase the quality of the writing? I dunno.
I’m not quite sure how to logistically do that. Every time I’ve set a goal to do something at a specific time each day, it always ends up not working out. Every day is different, and different obligations pop up at different times. I suppose I could set a flexible time, such as “after lunch” or “before such and such class,” but would it really work? I don’t know.
I think the ideal thing would be to get so excited about your writing that you think about it when you don’t have to think about anything. That way, you’re much more motivated and it’s natural to make the time.
But writing doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of thing that you can do when you’re bored. It takes a lot more thought than watching TV or browsing random blogs and websites. I heard from somewhere once that the brain is naturally wired to minimize work and maximize output. That means that you’re naturally wired to seek for highly stimulating things that require little or no effort to obtain. I’m sure it’s possible, through an exercise of will, to overcome that, but it would require quite a lot.
Besides that, writing strikes me as something that you can’t really do in little chunks here and there. If you want to catch up on your blogs, you can go to a kiosk between classes and check out half a dozen or so before you have to go. But writing is something that, in order to do well, you have to take time to work yourself up a little bit more than that. It takes inertia, and it’s hard to accelerate if you’re starting from zero. Once you’re going (I’ve found) you can go practically forever, but it takes a bit to get started–to REALLY get started.
Because of all this, I think that writing really is something that you have to set aside the time to do–it’s not something you can just expect to naturally do when you’re bored. This means that the solution is either to set aside a time each day (either by the clock or by routine) or keep it constantly on the front of your mind.
I’m going to try doing that. I’m going to try to get my writing done during the day and not right before I go to bed. Maybe while I’m eating lunch…
