Saturday, March 15, 2014

Been Writing... Been Editing....

I'm writing again.

Yay!

Yep, I love writing as much as I love reading.  It's a pure and unadulterated joy to take part in passing on the imagery to you readers.  

However, it's hard work and takes up a huge chunk of my time.  Often, I work through the night and I'm tanked and zombied the next day, living on caffiene to survive the daylight hours - then I go and do it all again!  It's a joy to create what you love to read, honestly it is, and it's torture to give up the ink and pens... I have tried to take a holiday from it and failed.

I did stop writing a few years ago - once - and I had the worse week of my life.

I didn't sleep.

I ate all the wrong foods.

My started having conversations with the characters I had created and that was a 24/7 kinda deal... it drove me nuts.

...and oh yeah, I was a zombie all day and night because I lost so much sleep.

So, one night, at around 1am, I turned on the computer, opened a document and just began writing.  I wrote all the ideas I had running around in my head.  And around two hours later, they were on the screen, I saved them to a thumb drive and didn't bother looking at how much I had written, and I turned off the computer and went back to bed and crashed.

The next day, I woke to my alarm - as always - ate breakfast, did my laundry and usual chores around the place and then it was time to turn on the computer... I had typed up around 10 pages of what was running around my head.  Woah!  

A week of not writing had done that to my brain?  So, I promised myself to keep up my writing - no matter how little or tiny the changes were - as it would bother me until the next day.  And I have.

Editing what I write a few days after I write it is a habit I've gotten into as I see it with fresh eyes and it's easier for me to see the problems, the mistakes, the spelling errors and anything else I've mucked up, no matter how small.  And being the perfectionist that I am - well most of the time - I make sure that it's all good and ready for everyone to read.  

So, what kind of techniques to you do to keep your writing skills up-to-date?  Have you tried to take a holiday from the craft - like I did? Were you successful?  Or did you fall flat on your face?  Until my next post, happy reading.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing more information about your writing experience. It's always fun to learn about how or why writer's write. This morning (It's 8:55am on Saturday, March 15th here on the West Coast of the USA) I just posted a video of Thomas Steinbeck sharing his secret to writing on my blog. It's always fun learning ho writers you enjoy reading write,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey, you're welcome. I have often had people ask me about how writers get their ideas, and I thought to add this subject into 'My Reading List' as writing books is just as big-a thing as reading and reviewing them. :D

      Delete