fic talk: olympian methods

[sword_logic]

(i need to stop trying to make witty titles.)

anyways, i started doing writing sprints with a friend and why did i never do this before. this has been such a sledgehammer for every block i've run into in the past week or so (which, wildly enough, has been a lot of blocks). this is so much fun. seriously, why in all hells did i not do this before.

it was kinda cool to see my totals, too; i don't think a goal word count or tracking word count would be productive for me, since i've tried doing that kind of thing with various projects/hobbies/etc and it usually just makes me feel bad. but! that being said, it was neat to see that i did stay pretty consistent in my wpm across sprints:

• 120 / 5min / 24wpm
• 247 / 10min / 25wpm
• 270 / 10min / 27wpm
• 321 / 15min / 21wpm

i think part of it is being held accountable by an Outside Force, and also, it's so nice to do things with friends. it's easy to do and requires no specific planning or setup or timing or anything more than "hey, wanna sprint?" and sharing a few sentences at the end is the best part.

in all the time that i've been writing fanfiction (which is... about 14 years? 13? give or take), i've never talked a lot about writing. i never really had a space or a community to do so; dA was more for art, and at the very very beginning of my fanfiction career (2006, babey!) i was the only person in my irl friend group who wrote fanfiction Very Seriously, for Plot and Character rather than silly shenanigans, so i eventually just stopped sharing it with my friends since we clearly weren't on the same page (lol) about the Creation of our Art. when i eventually migrated to tumblr and started reading, writing, and sharing fic in earnest, i somehow managed to get it in my head that i shouldn't ever talk about The Process of writing, that i should just deliver my fanfiction and let it be this monolithic Thing that sprang out of my head like athena from zeus, and that the "DVD commentary" type memes were a special exception, a limited-time-only look into what goes on in a Writer's Brain, because that should never be shared otherwise.

obviously that's all bullshit and also a pretty long-winded paragraph, but the point is that now that i'm doing it, it feels so good to regularly talk about writing, whether it's the thinking-out-loud of making a post here on dw or griping to friends about being stuck. and then, too, it's great to have sprints as a way to say "hey, let's unstuck together" and to share this hobby. i'm still unlearning a lot of utterly unnecessary caginess (and insecurity!) about sharing my writing, art, etc. and damn if it doesn't feel good to know i've dismantled a lot of it already.

also, apropos of nothing – interestingly enough, i've noticed that for the past year or so i've been writing almost entirely chronologically, whereas i always used to write just kind of all over the place.

also also: i've written well over 3k words in the past month. hell yeah.

They’d both managed to scrape together some map data from around the city, plotting out a steady course of civilization – former, or enduring, or both – leading northwards along a network of roadways, crawling towards Armonia like veins. Maybe they did carry the planet’s lifeblood, once; hauling lumber and crops to the space elevator to be dispatched to spaceports in- and out-of-system.

Comments

[sword_logic]

yes! i love hearing other people talk about writing, whether it's DVD commentary-type stuff or "this is what i'm trying to puzzle out" or anything. it's so fun to see how other people Do The Thing so i'm gonna share how i do the thing too.

and thank you! :D