Every once in a while I get a bug to reform myself and write things in sequence. Finish a story, start the next one, finish it, and so on. A nice, neat linear progression, no distractions from new or other old ideas. Just sit down and work through a story. End of story.
And every time I get that bug, I am stomping on it within a month. I can't even write consecutively within a story. I bounce from end to beginning to middle to another story entirely. It's not at all uncommon for me to finish something, and for the next week sit around working on three stories until I pick one to focus on, and then I end up opening something else I haven't touched in ages, or working on somethign entirely new. Most of my WIPS are disconnected chunks of prose and ideas, and usually by the time I get to the point of filling it all in, I've changed most of what was there originally.
I never learn that I don't think in a straight line. Even in day-to-day stuff, I'm bouncing between five or six things all the time. I do something at one task that reminds me of another task, and I work my way around until everything's been fit into its place. Writing rough drafts of papers for school used to send me into fits, because I don't do drafts. I add and tweak and revise every time I open a document, and when it's done, it's done, unless I'm having fits about a specific issue, then I send it off to someone.
I used to think that this inability to just sit down and produce a story from beginning to end and move on to the next was what held me back as a writer, but I've been producing pretty consistently (averaging a fanfic a month) for the last two years, so I think that was more an issue of what I was writing, not how I was writing it. But still, sometimes, it would be nice to think in a straight line.
Posted by naiad at April 7, 2005 05:10 PM