published weekdays
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rules
I’ve written here over the last week that I’m participating in a month-long writing challenge called NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, wherein the rules are to write every day and complete a fifty thousand word novel by the end of November.
There are rules, of course, some written and some implied.
All of those rules are on the honor system.
There are rules about starting early. There are rules about editing. There are rules about how you engage other people about what they are writing. There are rules about just about everything.
But in creative pursuits rules can also just be guidelines, too, and some of the best results come from colouring outside the lines.
I had a social media conversation last week where someone asked about the “rules” for creating art. What was allowed, like, if using a straightedge to draw a line was considered breaking the rules.
But like many creative pursuits, even if there was a rule that said you shouldn’t draw straight lines with a ruler, only freehand, then there would also be a hundred better reasons than rules to break any such rule and use any tool your wanted to draw as many straight lines as you pleased.
I’ve broken a few NaNoWriMo rules while I might fess up about breaking them, I think the final result will prove that those rules were mostly just strong suggestions anyhow.
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farming
I’ve been known to spend some of my free time playing video games, and particularly when I’ve had a creatively productive day I enjoy turning on a console and booting up some gaming action.
But if you’re picturing me right now playing some first person shooting adventure rampage, this week you’d be way off. I’ve been relaxing with a title called Farming Simulator, where you harvest virtual crops and deliver them to the grain elevator and track the economics of commodity prices while saving up for new and better equipment.
A gaming recap would not have much place on this blog, however, except as I’ve been playing I’ve been thinking of the parallels between farming, virtual or otherwise, and a career in a creativity-driven profession.
In simple terms, as a farmer you take an initial investment at the beginning of the season and you spend time, resources, fuel, and energy planting a crop into the ground. Weeks pass and those seeds turn into seedlings. Months pass and those seedlings turn into mature plants. And more time passes before your plants turn into something that you can harvest and sell. You make no money from any of your work until you pull the wheat from the ground and sell it. Months of work for one payoff at the end of the expended effort.
As a creative you take an initial investment at the beginning of your career too. You plant lots of seeds, of a sort, making your art or writing your words as you spend time, resources, brainpower and energy making a lot of things. Time passes and you edit, refine, accumulate, and build a collection of work, and very likely during this time you are not making any money from any of your work… until one day you do. Months or years of work for a payoff at the end of an extended effort.
Who says video games can’t make you think big thoughts, huh?
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marathon
Yesterday was the New York City marathon—far away from where I am, but always in my heart as one of my favourite completed races. I ran a marathon in October, though, so I know a little bit about of how many of those tens of thousands of people have spent the last months (or even longer) of their lives.
Every day they think about running. Multiple times per week they are on the roads and trails putting in time and distance to just do this one thing, and do it better: to run. They think about running when they put food in their bodies. They think about running when they getting ready for bed. They plan their marathon as a huge single day goal and epic achievement at the end of a long stretch of small steps, sometimes literally, to get there.
I’ve been writing a novel in November and there is an analogy to running in my own approach.
Every day I think about writing. Multiple times per week, almost daily in fact, I’m at the keyboard or my notebook putting in time and words to just do this one thing and to do it better: to write. I think about writing when I’m reading or watching films. I think about writing as I’m falling asleep each night and playing my plot over and over in my head. I’m planning to be done a complete novel, which is an epic achievement, but that will be at the end of a long stretch of small steps, thousands of sentences, plots, characters, settings and twists knitted together at just the right pace, all just to get there.
And then sometimes I go for a run after I’m done writing.
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one thousand
One thousand is simultaneously a lot —and not very much at all. It really depends on what you are counting.
A thousand dollars can change someone’s life (or at least their month) but a thousand dollars is a rounding error in a corporate budget.
A thousand days is almost three years and time enough for almost anything to happen to the average person, but a thousand days is the blink of an eye in the scale of history and barely worthy of a moments thought.
A thousand words can tell an entire story, but a thousand words is little more than a few pages and a seeming drop in the bucket of a whole published novel.
I’ve been writing a novel this month and I tackle it in one thousand word chunks, simultaneously a lot of work to sit down and write and yet not very much at all.
But still —a thousand words, over and over and over again adds up.
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documenting
When I was working in government I wrote a lot of documents.
And while I’m sure that there are many people who can sit down and write these same kinds of documents in a linear, start to finish way, I could not do it like that.
I had a strategy, thought.
I started with an outline. I would flesh out the headings. I will fill in the obvious bits. I’d add placeholder text for words and data that I knew needed to go somewhere but for which I also knew I’d need to spend more time thinking about. I worked iteratively at random points to build, expand, elaborate, and refine.
In the end, I would have a complete document that was usually enough to pass through the web of bureaucracy for “input” and my part would be done.
I don’t want to directly compare writing a fictional novel to crafting a government document, but there are likely enough similarities to ponderer them all the same in piecing together a coherent story which is not written start to finish but rather starting from an outline that is deepened, expanded, elaborated, and refined across the writing process.